Information portal at property companies

Attended a few days ago a seminar at Hypergene's office in Stockholm about the use of their business intelligence solution among property companies. (They have 20 property companies as their customers.)

Below is a screen from one of their installations at a large property owner. When the user log in to the portal a unique set of information is displayed for that particular user.

In this example it is the start page for a property manager with through the dashboard directly is displayed how he is doing compared to budget. Impressive and user-friendly!

 
           Jonas Leisvik from Hypergene is presenting their product. 

The product
Hypergene EOS is a 'complete product complete product for advanced and user-customized presentation of information'.  It starts with importing data from, for example, property management systems, financial software and energy systems. Then displaying it a user friendly way. Making it possible to drill down to the lowest level of information for example see an unique invoice.

During the entire presentation it was stressed how user-friendly the solution was. And trust me it is. According to a research by University of Cork (see the graph below) it scores higher than other major BI solution out there.

The evolution is clear.
The specialised software is only used by a handful of people (for example the property management system) and then the waste majority of the users are using a web-based portal where the most important data and the simplest functions are built in.

See it yourself?
Hypergene are running another set of ½-day sessions in the beginning of April in Stockholm, Göteborg and Malmö. Find out more here.

Reflections from Realcomm Europe 2009

Earlier this week I spent a couple of days in London attending the second Realcomm Europe event and meeting up with great people from the RE.net world.

First of all, congratulations to Jim Young and Howard Berger for putting this event together. I very much believe there is a need for such events. The 'IT-in-real-estate-industry' can't complain that no one sees the benefits of our solutions if we are not creating/supporting as many channels as possible to communicate our offers. It's like Christmas, if you don't give, you want receive. 

So the Realcomm team; it's we that say Thank You.

The size
There were some 140 people attending the conference, which of roughly half were from property companies. The rest were software suppliers, consultants and media. In addition there were some 10 exhibitors.

A rather small event considering that an IT-in-property-day in Sweden a few months ago also attracted some 100+ attendees. (Sweden is one 6th of UK in terms of population.)

The content
A challenge in organising an 'IT-in-the-real-estate-industry' event is that the area covers everything from Intelligent building to board room reports (including CRM, tenant reporting, marketing, property management, valuation, market information and so on). Which makes it extremely challening to put together a compelling set of presentations.

From my perspective the most interesting reflections of the day where;

'Boardroom quality dashboard online and update'
An interesting discussion took of regarding why the 'upper' management doesn't push the reporting to be more up to date than a paper report that has data that is maybe up to a month old. "Why not a screen with all the up to date data?".

The battle of an XML standard in the industry
The standard is there. Who is stopping it? The lack of interest from the clients or the software suppliers defending it's market shares? There seems to be some differences why it takes so long..

... but the banks will solve the standard issue
Stephen Spooner, Executive Chairman of PISCES, had a great presentation pointing out the current financial crisis will have "a number of regulations coming in" and "lenders need data to analyze the tenants". All this detailed data will then also be requested to be updated. In other words, "the lenders will push the evolution!".

Innovation... finally
The biggest innovation at the event didn't come from the presenters, but the organisers.

 At the final session, the Realcomm team gave out TurningPoint audience response system devices and ran a series of questions. That really sparked the conversations.

Great innovation!
Next year maybe the attendees will push it start using Twitter as a backchannel... Well, one day it happen. (Like for the standard format!) The residential brokers are already doing it.

While I was in Costa Rica...

... quite a few things happened.  

I spent January in Costa Rica surfing some of the best waves on the planet (Santa Teresa). It was a brilliant.

The first three weeks was offline and then I worked remotely the last two weeks. Combining a Swedish lifestyle (6 weeks vacation a year) with the possibilities of the web is great.  (Also happy to give Michael Arrington more fuel...)

Hemnet - Major changes in the management
The largest search engine on Swedish market is looking for a new CEO after that Björn Dietmann has stepped down. The news was picked up by PropertyPortalWatch. Impressive. The press release is found here (in Swedish).

There are more changes at Hemnet. After seven year as chairman, will Lars Kilander be replaced by Per Johnler(who also is CEO of Fastighetsbyrån, one of the largets brokers in Sweden). However, Lars will still be on the board. Finally, Hemnet also has a new Director of Sales; Andreas Löwgren(an article in Resumé).

The question is; has the pressure from Booli and Boliga forced those changes to occur?

Boligan launched in Norway
The Danish residential search engine is continuing its Nordic growth. On the same day as Inman, they entered the Norwegian market. Press Release is found here. More is found at PropertyPortalWatchand an earlier post on this blog.

The Inman Conference New York 
Early in January the Inman event Real Estate Connect NY 2009 took place in New York. Read about it at Inman, Mike's Corner, Notorious Rob, Jay, Matrix and Dustin. 

I had the opportunity to visit their event last summer in San Francisco and it is for sure an energy boost. (Even though I prefer more commercial real estate focus.)

If you are Premium member of the Inman service you have a great source of information from event on their site. Including for example a 25 pages summary paper and video of quite a few of the speeches! Way to go.

For the first time ever (I guess) there was a Swedish firm represented on the stage, Booli (a residential search engine, covered here). Unfortunately, they haven't put this video on the web yet.

Zoopla raised more money
The UK based residential property information and valuation service has raised another £ 3,75 million. Great coverage at the Renthusiast.

Morten Lund was declared personally bankrupt
Not much real estate connection (more than that the bank took his house), but what a believer in the web Morten is. This story is a must read for any entrepreneur. Don't miss the video (at the bottom) of his speech at Le Web a few months ago. Read more at his blog.

An IT supplement in a CRE magazine

In Sweden there is no publication focusing on the use of IT in the real estate. However, one of the largest CRE magazines, FastighetsTidningen (owned by The Swedish Property Federation) has at least a IT supplement in one of their yearly issues.

It is named IT & Property and it's 52 pages covers a wide range of topics.
The ones that got my attention were;

The customer satisfaction is rising
A survey, conducted for the paper, among clients of Property Management Suppliers shows three large conclusions:

• Most clients are satisfied with their suppliers (but wasn’t from the beginning)
• The area with most complaints is the user interface (especially to make it easy for non-hard core users)
• The suppliers are moving online (finally... if you ask me...)

Status among the Property Management suppliers
In two articles the status of the 15+ suppliers of Property Management Systems are analyzed, with the highlights of:

• DinaFastigheter has been around for 2 years and has 250 clients
• Estatus which in 2006 was founded in 2006 has now a complete web-based system with 10 clients (and has been acquired by SoftOne Fastigheter)
• Modus which has, since 2003, been developing a brand new system together with MKB (large property owner in Malmö) is still some time from a public release
• Fast2 is developing SMS service for renting of student housing
• LEB is working on a complete new code version which will make their system much easier to personalize
• VITEC has created a much more customer focused organisation
• 5D-system is focusing on integration using XLM standard
• PONDUS has released a web version

BIM is moving forward, but it’s a long way
The topic of BIM (Building Information Model) is covered extensively.  Especially the academic research conducted by Rogier Jongeling. You find all his publications here. An additional article here in Byggindustrin (in Swedish).

More about the supplement
It is written by Björn Åslund, a freelance journalist and among other things a blogger about environment topics.

The entire supplement could be downloaded as a PDF version here (5 MB).

Brilliant wish list from Remit Consulting

Got a 'Merry Christmas Greeting' today that included a list to great to spare.
It is Remit Consulting in the UK that put together a wish list for the property industry.

10. We would like one standard reference code for every individual property so that all systems can add information to a property accurately – perhaps searchable on Google?

9. We would like completely standard form, web-based leases so that negotiations for new premises can be swift and cheap. And, in the UK, we would like standard 5 year terms.

8. We think “Black-box” property trading (e.g., I want to buy 3 shops at 6%) would reduce the cost of trading property and commoditise a whole class of property investments. An alternative to derivatives?

7. We would like to see Google Earth updated by live satellite images – perhaps even zooming in to see truck or car movements on our managed sites;

6. We want listed companies to agree a standard of reporting on publicly accessible reporting dashboards – online detail which would make investing in property companies more transparent;

5. We would like to see the last of chasing cheques from tenants – let’s enforce the use of direct debits and monthly rentals in advance – an end to collecting rent on horseback, as Bob puts it;

4. Why can’t we have daily property revaluations? Whole swathes of the residential property market relies on automated valuations – surely there is a mid-way point between a full inspection with detailed analysis of scarce comparables and no valuation at all;

3. Wouldn’t indexed rents be a step forward? Our apologies to the UK rent-review surveyors but this would modernise UK property leases at one fell swoop;

2. Longer lunch breaks to give more time for discussing how to make things better – we are working more remotely, and with tighter deadlines; let’s take the time to consider how things could be done;

And, at number 1 position:

1. We want banks to start lending to each other again. ‘Nuff said.

Brilliant! 
It also make you understand the differences that exist between countries; like 10, 5 and 3...   ;-)   

Keep up the great work and Merry Christmas to you Andrew, Mark, Melita and all of the rest.