ARGUS and Circle merges

Full disclosure: I'm the Product Manager for a Swedish DCF product. Read more here.

A MAJOR supplier of DCF (Discounted Cash Flow models) solutions has been created when the UK based Circle Software Ltd and US based Realm Business Solutions Inc have decided to merge (The press release).

"Two leading providers of software solutions to the commercial real estate industry, London-based Circle Software and Houston-based Realm Business Solutions, today announced the merging of their respective firms into one global entity.

Based in London , Circle Software was founded in 1990 by Adrian Katz, a designated member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. Circle’s flagship product is Visual Investor, a property and portfolio valuation software program that is the current industry standard in the UK and is broadly used in many countries within continental Europe and the Asia Pacific region where the UK capitalisation approach is employed. Circle also produces and markets CircleDeveloper, the worldwide standard for development appraisals and pro formas.

Realm’s flagship product, ARGUS, is the industry standard among those countries and companies that employ the discounted cash flow (DCF) methodology to value real estate assets. Pioneered and made popular in the US , DCF methodology is quickly gaining the endorsement of many international standards organisations and universities. Realm’s product suite also includes popular tools for property management, portfolio management and budgeting, automated leasing, business intelligence and collaboration and workflow management. "

This merge will indeed be interesting to follow.
I don't have any numbers but this new company has to be, by far, the number one on the market. Any directory of Investment Analysis Software is too be long but I doubt any other supplier is even close.

Hus.se to be an informationportal for house owners

Martin Edenström at What.se published a great post about Internet services for the real estate market (in Swedish).

One of the services covered, to be released later in 2007, is hus.se (in English that would be house.com). There aim is to be an information portal and community for house owners.

Behind the initiative is Quality Unlimited AB in Umeå, which started of by purchasing the domain www.hus.se for 400 000 SEK (about 60 000 USD).

The future of Internet has been updated

Well, the movie "EPIC 2014" made by Robin Sloan for the Museum of Media History has been updated.

It's a brilliant film (9 minutes long) about the possible future of Internet.
You have to see it!

Skandiamäklarna invests in online marketing

The Swedish brokerage firm Skandiamäklarna will, according to an article in Dagens Media, shift the marketing to focus mainly on online for 2007.

A starting point is a new site, valkommenhem.se (Welcome home), aiming to inform and inspire home buyers.

For example, the site gives you the opportunity to see the effect of home styling.

The Swedish consulting firms need to pay attention to Google

The Swedish commercial real estate market has been very popular for many years to international investors. For example, some  years up to 70% of the investments have been done by non-Swedish investors.

Today I went through the statistics, provided by Squarespace, for this blog regarding 'Search Engine Queries' (that is, phrases used by people that eventually end up at this site) and to my surprise I found that quite a few had been using "Swedish real estate 2007 outlook".

Of course, I tried it and to my surprise I made it to number one!
Shouldn't that place be 'owned' by some of the larger commercial consulting firms in Sweden? I guess they don't do to much of Search Engine Optimization...