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

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).

Today I attended an open meeting with the Swedish standardisation organisation Fi2 (in Swedish 'Föreningen för förvaltningsinformation') which aims to make it easier to exchange information within the lifecycle of a (commercial) property.

The organization was founded in the mid 90s and is showing more and more results. Especially among suppliers of Property Management Systems but also in the new field of energy reports that from 2009 must be reported to The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning from 2009.

Pisces in the UK
Another organization that shows result in the area of standardization is  the UK based organization PISCES. At the PCS Expo in London in October an impressive presentation was conducted by 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 PISCES standard XML schema. Read more about this at this Realcomm Advisory.

The need is there but it is hard work
There is no question that there will be benefits for standards in the real estate industry but it is hard work to set it in place. So I'm very impressed by those people and companies that is putting efforts behind it. Keep up the good work.

Less than three weeks after Hemnet told us that there is no need to improve a new competitor today enters the Swedish residential listing market... 

The service is called Booli (in Beta mode of course) and is aiming to be the search engine for residential listings and market information in Sweden.

The people behind Booli
Two weeks ago I had the opportunity to sit down with two of the founders, Anders Kyhlstedt (Head of Marketing) and Peo Nilsson (CEO). Both are serial entrepreneurs that see an inefficient market. They are teaming up with Daniel Kapland, a very successful Internet entrepreneur, who runs the incubator Firm Factory. In total there are some 10 people working at Hemson Sök AB (the company behind the service).

My first impression
After playing around an hour with the tool, I'm indeed impressed. There is no question that this crowd has extensively Internet experience and a vision how to create a consumer product.

Functionality I like...
... saving listings, so easy but so powerful
... my placard, which display what has happened in my area of interest (including listings that has been removed)
... easy to update the search list
... great mapping functionality
And from the discussion with the founders I know that there is more to come. Even maybe some Zillow functionality... (it is also stated on their site)

How they do it
Booli is first of all a search engine finding listings at the brokers sites. They don't primarily use crawlers (collect the data) sites like Hemnet or Bovision. According to a Booli (unconfirmed) comment in this blog post, less then 1% of the listings are from other listings services.

Business model
Based on advertisement and, I assume, enhanced listings in the future. There is no question, that they have been inspired by services like Trulia and Nestoria. Their goal is first of all to be a tool for the consumers (not the broker).

Challenges?
However, the do have quite a few challenges;
... trust, the consumer must trust that Booli has at least the same number of listings that Hemnet (or  Bovision for that reason). The functionality has limited value if the listings aren't there
... the reaction from the brokers community, there has been people trying this before but hasn't been successfully
... stamina to let the people get used to run their residential search here instead
... take it from Beta mode (it is still only for greater Stockholm and according to themselves, there are more listings in the database than on the site)

It will be very interesting to follow the evolution of residential listing.
Let the fight for the customers begin.

Additional reading is found here,  here,  here and here (all in Swedish).

It has for sure been a busy week for Hemnet, the number one listing service in Sweden for residential homes.

Server crash put a hold on updates
According to an article in Dagens Industri (financial paper) a server went down last Saturday and put a hold to all updates put in by brokers on that day. The irony is that this was just a few days before their switch to the new platform (se below).

Upgrading the technical platform
Earlier this week (but after the crash) Hemnet introduced their new platform (press release in Swedish). The old one had been around for 10 years.  From a user perspective the only difference is a new mapping functionality. This is the second switch of mapping in a year.

In the DI article above explains Hemnet CEO Björn Dietmann that the main reasons for the upgrade are:
   1. to secure the availability
   2. to make the publishing process of new listing easier and faster

In other words, less focus on the end user. Which comes to no surprise since Hemnet is owned by the brokerage community (and two large newspapers). Hemnets explanation (in the DI article) is that their user groups have strongly demanded NOT to change how the site works. Isn't there a way to add better functionality and still keep the basics searches as they are?

"The most underdeveloped site in Sweden"
As a comment to the new release, with lack of major improvements for the end user, the Swedish blog webstrategi.se describes Hemnet to be 'the most underdeveloped site in Sweden". 

Robert (the author behind the blog) for sure has a point if you ask me. Hemnet is a great service since it consists of 90%(?) of all listings. However, if you search actively for a new home (like me and my wife where 6 months ago) there are easily 20 new functions that one would have appreciated greatly.

My suggestion to the owners of Hemnet, make the 'feed' of listings available to other to build web sites on. That would increase the marketing of your listings. Isn't that the point?

Today Aftonbladet (Swedens largest tabloid) took 'their' comparable sales online. 

The service is available as part of Aftonbladet's existing PLUS subscription, which costs 19 SEK per month (~3 US Dollars). Those listings have every now and then been put in the regular paper. So the move to a digital version comes as no suprise. The data is provided by Värderingsdata AB, which has a number of professional services focusing on comparable sales.

The offer consists of a list with;

• adress
• link to the Hitta.se mapping solution  
• sales price  (SEK)
• area  (square meters)
• seller
• buyer

However, the service takes limited advantage of the technical possibilites. It's only a list, nothing more. No searching, re-ordering , any detailed data on the house, just the last two months of sales. To mention a few limitations.

I guess those limitations are there for a reason...

Drew at GeekEstateBlog posted an entry about a game called "Price Me Now" from the folks at Realius. It's about guessing the sales price of real life listings. Sounds great!

"Realius will allow conference attendees to play its flagship game, Price Me Now™, which challenges players to guess the price of homes for sale in their market, on the show floor. Price Me Now™ evaluates player guesses and awards points based on their performance against the “Realius” price, an aggregate combination of previous player price estimates and the actual list price. Real estate companies and professionals can purchase placement in the game as “coaches” who guide players and make their own professional price guesses."

Will be interesting to see how it will be used by the RE industry, maybe it will be used...

... at universities
Why not include this game in courses about pricing the real estate market?

... by brokers/appraisals
This is the opportunity for all brokers and appraisals to show that they are better then Zillow to forecast the sales price!     

I guess they don't include listings in Sweden...   ;-)

 No matter what you do, there is always a need to look at your business from a different perspective. One way to do this, is to change environment and see how business is conducted elsewhere.

For this reason Datscha has spend a couple of days in New York meeting up with excellent people to hear their story and exchange experiences. It has been indeed rewarding and in the upcoming week I will write some posts about it.

It is also very rewarding to show the Datscha service to someone not used to doing business in Sweden since it normally 'blow their mind'. Firstly, due to the fact that so much information could be gathered about the property market. Secondly, their is no equivalent to a web-based DCF module over here.

And who doesn't enjoy such a positive reaction?   ;-)

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.