The believer

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.

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

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!

... is found here at 1000watt blog.

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

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).

The Swedish design & communication magazine Cap&Design has a makeover of Hemnet (the Swedish listing service, earlier coverage) in their latest issue. It's done by Daytona and the result looks like below (the article is found here).

Carl Bjurling and Thomas Le Guellaff from Daytona have focused on;
   1. search using pictures
   2. all listings should have the same layout
   3. add services for home renovation
   4. making it easier on 'open house' day with possibility of GPS coordinates 

My thoughts
I like the idea to add a search more based on pictures, just like the way the ads are done in a newspaper. It's a quick way to browse through a list and get a sense of the listing. The same with the functionality helping out on the day of 'open house'. (A possibility to create an account and mark interested listings should be a minimum.)

The same layout for all listing on the detailed page will be complicated since Hemnet only gather a few searchable parameters then link the visitors to the detailed page at each brokers website. Everything is possible, but that one will involve quite a few changes to the overall technical architecture.

I don't believe in creating more services around the lifecycle of a home. Hemnet (or a service like this) should stay focused on investing in a home, not how to renovate it.

Overall, it's a good suggestion on a service that is easy to pick on. But fact speaks for it self, Hemnet still has the most listings and is the preferable choice to start your search. One has to wait an see if new services like Booli (earlier coverage) and bospindeln will change this.

Computer Sweden (the largest IT paper in Sweden) ran a SaaS topic last week including a conference (when I was in Cannés...).

The seven articles are found here (in Swedish).

It's great to see this effort and I'm looking forward to more to come.
(Also glad that they put in the effort to find other SaaS representatives than just Salesforce...)

A tradition in the commercial property industry is to meet up in Cannés (France) in the beginning of March for informal meetings. The reason is to visit the annual MIPIM event. An event that brings 28 000 attendees from 85 countries (some 800 (!) from Sweden.)

More info about MIPIM
Click here for photos from MIPIM.

Great coverage on MIPIM is found at CNBC (special MIPIM coverage), PropertyWeek (UK based property magazine), PropertyEU (independent research site) and the blogs at bdonline (architects) and TheLawer (infosite)   

A new traditon for IT believers
This year Datscha (where I'm the Product Manager) gathered IT focused professionals for a drink at our yacht. Even on a short notice quite a group showed up and it was a great gathering. It's always great to meet people that share a common belief. See you all next year.

It comes as no surprise that the Swedish start up Booli (a start up offering search engine for residential listings on the Swedish real estate market, earlier coverage) was going to create a debate in the market.

However, earlier this week Lars Kilander, CEO of Mäklarsamfundet (the Association of Swedish Real Estate Agents), made it easy for many papers this week to create selling headlines with the quote (my translation)  "We don't believe it is better with more listing services, it just gets more complicated for the buyers". 

I guess that there are few things that customers dislike more than being told what they like.

Press about the debate (in Swedish)
DN:  the article by DN (the largest newspaper in Sweden)
Metro: here 
DinaPengar: here
Realtid: two articles here and here
DagensPS: one
JönköpingsNytt: an article  (with a slightly different approach)
From the blogosphere: here, here, here

The response from Booli
Is found here.

The letter
The background is that the press has found out that a letter has been sent to all members of Mäklarsamfundet asking their members "to protest" against Booli in order to keep their 'own' service Hemnet  (read more) as 'the one and only' listing service (forgetting that there already exist another one in Bovision).

A company that is going 'Bedouin' on a large scale is MySQL. Today I learned that they have 400 employers in 23 countries out of which 80% (?) works from home!

Read more here and here.

Imagine the impact on the property industry (read office market) if a greater number of companies takes this approach!