Real Estate goes Spotify...

Finally, a real estate connection to Spotify...   ;-)

The Swedish brokerage firm Svensk Fastighetsförmedling is advertising in the newly-released-so-hyped service. Impressive.

Residential comps for free at Booli

Booli, the Swedish search engine for residential listings, continues to create brilliant functionality for buyers (maybe not for the brokers and sellers). Their latest step is to offer residential comparable sales for free.

The comparables are listed with information on:

• price  
• date  
• name on buyer and seller  
• address  
• real estate broker  
• difference compared to asking price  

Below is an example from a small village in Sweden. The red symbols are comparable sales; the blue are listings.

How it works
The information is purchased from the Swedish Land Register and updated every night (I suppose, since new data is released daily). The service does only include single family houses (not apartments).

The price for sold apartments is not available through the Land Register. However, it is manually collected through the company Mäklarstatistik, which is owned by Mäklarsamfundet (The Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents ) and the two largest brokerage firms in Sweden; Fastighetsbyrån och Svensk Fastighetsförmedling. The data is not published for free, but available through products from Värderingsdata.

First with national coverage
The idea to provide this data for free is not new. The local newspaper MittI started with this service in Stockholm earlier this year, but Booli is first with national coverage. It could also be seen as a response to the newly introduced service from Boligan.se who displays differences on asking price.

Introduction of a new business model
Information on comparable sales has been available for many years through PC or Client/Server products from companies like Ljungqvist, Värderingsdata and Svefa. However, those services have been for business clients and attached with a fee.

Two of them have provided free versions like Villvärdet (see example) from Ljungqvist and BoPriset from Värderingsdata (see below for an example). However, none of them are as comprehensive or user friendly as Booli's version. And none of them also displays the listings. On the other hand, Booli is the first to bring in advertisement (which is part of the business model).

More info
Is found at the Booli blog and from coverage in mainstream media like Ny Teknik and Veckans Affärer.

Inman on a European research tour

In preparation for their global event in January (New York) the Inman organisation is going on a European research tour. They will be visiting;

• London              October 17-20
• Amsterdam     October 22
• Paris                 October 27
• Berlin                October 30

Interested in meeting them?
Drop a line to Joel Burslem at Inman, joel@inman.com

Unfortunately, they will not be visiting Sweden.

Joining Inman 'International Advisory Group'

It's official, I'm now part of the Inman 'International Advisory Group'.
Makes me proud just to be on the same list like the people below.

The Inman events
I went to my first Inman event this summer (remember, I'm located in Sweden!) and it was brilliant (coverage). If you're interested in the field of IT meeting residential real estate this is the place to be.

Events
I'm happy to help organisations like Inman to further develop their events. Because I strongly believe each country (and then a few global ones) needs an event like those. Both where end-users can meet suppliers, but also where believers could meet up and share the energy.

I'm soo Spotified...

Yes! 
I've got my own Spotify account!

It's in Private Beta and is for sure the most wanted service to sign up for in Sweden.

I've previously got a demo of the service and got directly hooked.
It's like 'iTunes on crack!'. (This may seams like a post out of topic but for me is this a great example of the use of Internet.)

The service
Spotify is a music service that on demand steams the songs to your computer. You do need to download a software in order to use it. However, you are able to log on to your own Spotify account on any computer with the software downloaded.

Read about the founders, a video, the office, and description (in Swedish) another one (also in Swedish).

The beauty
The easiest way to explain the beauty is to imagine an iTunes account where you save your songs in 'the cloud' and you can easily play them from any computer (after the small download).

The cost
When going live it is said rumoured to be in two versions;

• ad based (both visual and audio)
• subscription based costing 300 SEK/month   (~50 USD)

The ultimate service for me would be to pay for this service and having the free distributed to the musicians based on the songs I play.

The looks
The service is brilliant in it's simplicity. You pretty much search, play and create play lists (which could be shared). All is extremely straight forward and amazing fast.

One more thing
Be aware if you have the possibility to try it.
It's seriously addictive...