My name is Magnus Svantegård (LinkedIn), live in Sweden, and is the Product Manager for Datscha and Partner in Stronghold Invest. I believe in smart use of Internet in the Real Estate industry.
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 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).
Today I attended the IT & Property fair in Sweden called 'Fastighetsbranschens IT-dag' (Swedish) which is arranged by SeminarDesign. This is the second year.
I hoped that it should have grown since last year, but the number of attendees (130) and exhibitors (6) is almost exact as last year. Hopefully it will grow in the future because I believe there is need for an event as this one. If not for our suppliers and believers to meet up an discuss 'war stories'.
It’s 3 am and I’ve just got home to Sweden after some hectic days at the PCS expo (a Property Computer Show) in London.
Being on panel for one session, attending another 5, get an understanding of 100 exhibitors and conducting 12 meetings in two days surely was surely a challenge…
My strongest impressions are;
More energy then ever – it’s my 3rd time going to this event and I haven't seen this much of energy before.
Finally the web has hit the property industry - almost every boot you went into was displaying their solution using a web page. Even property management systems have taken on a SaaS aspect (well kind of… more about that later)
The most impressive presentation was about e-Leases - Chris Lees from Calvis had a brilliant walk through of the project how one of UK's largest property owners has gotten four law firms to use Acrobat Reader documents to fill in and send the lease agreements (including over 200 data fields) using a PISCSES standard XML schema. Which has the effect that the data gets directly imported in to the owners property management system without re-typing any data.
Rewarding to meet other believers - One of the great benefits of going to an event such as this one is about meeting other believers. One needs that ones in a while.
In the upcoming week I’ll write more posts about my experience and thoughts about PCS.
Magnus (The Believer)