Booli covers entire Sweden (and more this spring)

Booli, the Swedish search engine for residential listings, has had a busy spring.

1. Coverage of the entire Sweden
In June Booli announced (in Swedish) that they are now covering the entire Sweden. An impressive task since there are some 6000 brokers (according to Booli) to make searchable.

A quick test in my home town Karlskrona shows that Booli is close (but not there yet) to have all the listings in Hemnet (the market leader in listings and owned by the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents). Anyway, an impressive first start for a service that just been around for 7 months)

2. Signs an exclusive deal with 'Villaägarna'
A week ago it became official that 'Villaägarna' (Association of house owners in Sweden) has included Booli in their site for searching houses on sale.

Read more about it 1 (press release) and 2 (Booli blog).

3. Internet Entreprenours of the year  
In April the Swedish magazine InternetWorld dubbed Booli to the 'Internet Entrepreneurs' of the year in Sweden.
Find the article here.

To sum up...
An quite impressive spring from a team that for sure believers in the smart use of Internet.

MyDealBook - A LinkedIn for the Commercial Real Estate industry

As far as I'm concerned, the commercial real estate market just got it's first social network. 

MyDealBook was released three weeks ago in the US. One of the founders is Ryan Slack, former CEO of PropertyShark (an information service for the commercial market), and the service also hits the ground running with adding the existing 300 000 PropertyShark users automatically to the network.

The idea for the service is (according to an Inman interview) a spin of from the user needs at PropertyShark;

"As CEO of PropertyShark, I found that our users were demanding that we let them meet other users: They demanded the ability to advertise on the site and they demanded more networking functions. MyDealBook addresses these needs",

MyDealBook is described by this Reuters article as:

"MyDealBook.com combines the best social networking techniques with powerful tools specific to the needs of real estate professionals.  Its features are designed to help users expand professional networks, find new business and manage projects.  Features include user profiles, messaging, networking and marketplace listings, as well as:
    Deals -- features a unique deal management system that allows users to post their professional activities to gain credibility, promotion for their projects, seek funding, market properties and share files
    Mini-feed -- provides users insight into the projects and deal flow within their network
    Events -- lists opportunities for real estate professionals to connect in person, including networking mixers, speed networking, conferences, training, site visits, fund raisers, sporting events, and more
    Groups -- enables users to join or form their own groups for specific purposes, such as organizing events, sharing deal information, collaborating, forming company teams, office networks and investment clubs
    Natural groups -- automatically groups users by company, profession, location, educational institution, professional association, state licensing and professional designation, to allow easy search and identification of
potential clients, business partners, or service providers
    Services -- provides powerful tools to search and match users with complementary business partners
    Jobs -- provides its users with opportunities to find or advertise job openings specific to the real estate industry.  

A niche not covered by Costar?
In this article in New York The Sun an associate director at the commercial real estate firm Newmark Knight Frank said the site could fill a niche not covered by services such as CoStar, the subscription-based Web site commonly used by office leasing brokers that offers only limited information about other industry professionals.

Find out more
About MyDealBook here;
   GeekEstateBlog  - an interview back in September
   4realz - have both a pod interview and a post about it 
   Inman coverage is found here and here

Going to Inman and ReBarCamp

Finally, the tickets are reserved for my trip to the US this summer. The main purpose is to take part at the Inman Connect conference (23rd - 25th July) and the ReBarCamp the day before. But also to take some vacation on the west coast.

This will be my first visit to an Inman event and is really looking forward to it. The agenda looks great. Also looking forward meeting you all!

A great product story...

... is found here at 1000watt blog.

I bet that client received 'the extra length' of support if he later on called in.

Free residential comps introduced to Stockholm

A daily routine for many in Sweden is to go through the comparable residential sales printed in the local paper. At least in the countryside where the local paper cover a smaller area (and the number of comps are fewer).

In large cities like Stockholm this hasn't always been the case since the 'local' paper normally is one of the two national papers, DN or SvD, which haven't put the effort in to this. (There are large papers in the country who has done it, for example Sydsvenskan (great mapping) och Helsingborg Dagblad (just a list).)

However, the local paper Mitt i Stockholm AB which runs 31 (?) local papers in Stockholm has been putting this information in their papers.

Next step, put the information online
Now has Mitt i Stockholm AB taken the next step and put this information online. The service started in April and hit the press a few days (1, 2, 3, 4) with the effect that the service was terrible slow the first days. However, I gave it a try today and it is an impressive web 2.0 service (in terms of being user friendly and designed).

You select a municipality (31 to choose from all in 'greater' Stockholm) and all comparable sales for residential real estates are shown (not multi-family).

The information per comparable sales listing includes:
   - address
   - purchase price
   - purchase date
   - assessment value
   - seller
   - buyer

By clicking on 'read more' the information is displayed like below.

The information feed is from the Swedish Land Register and is (I assume) updated every night (at least it could be).

More to come
Mitt i Stockholm (as many local papers) is working hard to provide super local news, information, classifieds, and also residential listings. (Read more about this localization of news at Mindpark.)  In an article in DI the Online Manager Peter Leijonspjuth states that this is just version 1.0 and more is to come.

Adding apartments comps?
Mentioned is to add comparable sales for apartments '(CoOps') before the summer. This is indeed impressive since this data is not collected by the government. The only source I'm aware of is through the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents('Mäklarsamfundet'). This data is today available on a summarized level at Mäklarstatistik and at the largest residential listing service Hemnet (which is owned and run by Samfundet). Both services has the same provider; Värderingsdata and costs about 100 SEK (~15 USD) for each search.

It will be interesting to see if this information will be published for free at Mitt i. Especially since Peter previously has worked at Teknik i Media which runs the technical platform for Hemnet and is quoted in the DI article that "it is important to never compete with Hemnet" (my translation).