Properazzi - A pan-European property search

Looking for properties in Europe, but having a hard time to figure out the worth of money? Then Properazzi will be a great starting point.

Officially launched today (after two years of technical development) the Barcelona located company has listen 1,8 million properties in 45 European countries.

Properazzi uses a crawler-based search engine technology to find listings at 1000s of estate and publisher sites across Europe.

Money worth over the border
According to Tom Dibaja, Outreach Specialist at Properazzi, they "don't at this stage aim to compete against national property portals. We’re more focused on property search more transparent, and making the maximum amount of information available to consumers. I think that once these features are more developed, many people buying a house in Sweden, for example, would like to know what their money would be worth in, say, the other Nordic countries, or even other parts of Europe."

I believe this a great idea. It's hard to figure out what are the national real estate portals if your are looking outside of your own country.

A look at Sweden
The Nordic region is for quite obvious reasons (I've to admit) not a primary region in a starting phase. However, Properazzi does have listings even in Sweden.

Even a red house with white garbles! (The very trademark of a house in the Swedish countryside.)  The listing currently are mostly from non-Swedish listings sites.

Founded by a successful team
In terms of founding Properazzi is venture-capital funded by Mangrove Capital Partners (who were originally behind Skype) and private investor Gil Penchina (eBay, Wikia, etc). Managing director, Yannick Laclau ,runs the business from Barcelona in Spain.

More reading at FoREM, Inman and Renthusiast.

CoStar acquires Propex; great news for believers

For a believer there are few things more rewarding then seeing other believers succeed.

Therefore my first thought when seeing that CoStar acquires Propex (for 22 million USD) goes to the believers behind the scene. People like Paul Marples (managing director) and Colin Barber (founder and commercial director). Both who I've been fortune to meet up with a number of times. True believers in the use of IT in the real estate industry .

My second thought is that the entire market of IT suppliers in the European real estate industry will profit from CoStar's continued expansion over here. The more (market-) money they spend here; the more attention the industry will pay. Which is the greatest thing, having people in the real estate industry starting to think that there may be improvements to be done in the way they are conducting the business. Still It's not about competion in the market place, it's about creating a market.

CoStar    (www.costar.com)
Founded in 1987 by Andrew C. Florance (now days the President & Chief Executive Officer) the company has created the largest researched online database of commercial property information. Their 1 000 researchers have inspected over 2 million properties, mainly in the US. The company is traded on NASDAQ, with $158.9 million in revenues (year-end 2006) and is indeed financial strong with "$158.1 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments, and no long-term debt".  More financial data is found here.

CoStar in Europe
CoStar has acquired 15 companies over the last 20 years starting of in Europe in 2003 by acquiring FOCUS, "a major U.K. provider of web-based access to verified commercial lease comparables, available space, requirements, tenants, planning information and photos across the United Kingdom".  Three months ago, in December 2006, CoStar also acquired Grecam, a provider of commercial property information, research and analytics in France. Read more about CoStar in Europe here.

Propex  (www.propex.co.uk)
Propex was formed in 1999 by Colin Barber, and really took of in year 2000 when the 18 largest investors in the UK joined forces in order to increase liquidity, transparency and efficiency across the real estate market by operating an electronic introduction and marketing platform. According to this article from, I assume PropertyWeek, Propex by year end in April 2006 had  a turnover of £1,7 million (3,3 million USD), with a recorded loss. However, the business seems to have increased substantiality during 2006 since the CoStar press release (in February 2007) talks about "... approximately $5 million in annual revenues...". Find out more about Propex seeing this video and reading. Paul Marples, Managing Director at Propex,  is from now also CoStar Group's senior strategist for developing an international investment sales platform.

Source: thanks Andrew Waller (Remit Consulting) for making me aware of this deal.

Google Apps is not about features

The 22th of february could be remembered as the G-day, the day Google released their Apps Premium service including already avaliable products. However, in this package they are free of ads, larger storage and tech support. See more coverage at TechCrunch or Cnet.

The most interesting point for me isn't a feature comparison with the Microsoft package (there is still a long way to go), which has been around since 1989, but more the fact that more and more business are moving to using the Internet as a platform for their business (and that Google starts charging for their services). Listen to a number of large business on their view of G-Apps.

One aspect often raised is if it's secure enough to have ones data on, for example, Googels servers. Find out more at those Zdnet blogs entries, the first  and the other.

Property & IT fair in Sweden

Finally, (five years since the last one) today there was a fair in Sweden entirely focused on smart use of IT within the property industry. This Property & IT fair in Stockholm was arranged by the Seminar Design Group.

(Actually the name for the day was, in Swedish, "Sänk kostnaderna genom EFFEKTIV INFORMATIONSHANTERING i ditt fastighetsföretag", i.e. "Reduce cost through efficient information management in your property company". That's not a catchy name!)

More pictures are to be found at Flickr.

The day attracted some 150 attendees and 6 (?) exhibitors. I was impressed by the former number (being the first one in five years) but not the latter number.

The overall impression
As one of the exhibitors I had a great day with a number of potential customers and a possibility to meet up with other companies in the business. (There were more suppliers attending then exhibited).

The speakers
The ones to be remembered was Bo Tyrefors, who had a great presentation about the work on a XML standardization done be Fi2 organization, and Niklas Walldan's presentation on the focus on processes within AP Fastigheter (one of the biggest property companies in Sweden). (My humble opinion is that some of the other speakers need to focus on improving their presentation skills.)

The exhibitors
The following companies where present;
Datscha     Online information and analyse solution  (full disclosure)
LEB             Property Management Software
3L                Property Management Software
NSI              Building automation systems and HVAC controls
Zon56        Outsourcing partner
CAD-Q       CAD consulting

Hopefully, this will be an annual fair.
There is a need in the market.
However, maybe not an interest...

Blogs covering the Inman event i NY

Ongoing in New York this week is the InmanNews event "Real Estate Connect NY 2007". I didn't have the opportunity to go there myself but with the benefits of other bloggers I could be able to (at least) take a sneak peak.

Here are some bloggers covering the event.

The Sellsius blog   (http://blog.sellsiusrealestate.com/)
As always a very active blog and so even at the IN event. For a walk through of the exhibition area, take a look at the video below.

(By the way, I like the name of this company....)

FOREM (http://www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com/)
I'm sure Joel will be adding post at an ongoing rate.

The IM event blog   (http://nycblog.realestateconnect.com/)
A way for attendees to set up a personal blogging account.

3Oceans (http://3oceansrealestate.com/blog/)
Kevin is adding comments on the different presentations.

TrueGotham (http://www.truegotham.com/)
Sums up the day.

Redfin (http://blog.redfin.com/blog/redfin/2007/01/at_real_estates_big_inman.html)
Glen Kelman at Redfin has a great post about the experience to be on the panel head on with Alan Dalton from the Move.com. Here is a follow up from 3Oceans. Another one at TechCrunch.

Keep up the good work fellow bloggers.

Update 13th January

I missed one blog that has done a great job to cover the Inman Event.

RealTownReport    (http://realtownreport.realtownblogs.com   )
Frances Flynn Thorsen has put together a number of posts about her experiences from the Inman Event. Includes a large number of photos.

I also noticed that Inman News picked up the list above.