The believer

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!

The most interesting presentation at the the IT fair was given by Magnus Stenberg from MySQL (an open source database provider from Sweden bought by Sun Microsystems for 1 billion USD).

The topic was if property management systems are ready for an open source approach. The question wasn't really answered. It was more about the story of MySQL and how clients in general could use their database technology. A very interesting presentation though.

Started a debate
Anyway, since I believed that there was to little debate and I wanted to increase the temperature I stated that one of the reasons when suppliers don't go for mySQL could be that they believe it will be more expansive when it comes to hire consultants in this field and referred to an article in Computer Sweden (the largest IT paper in Sweden). Not surprisingly, this point was denied. (Even   laughed at which in a sense proves the point...)

The 'fact'
Unfortunately I wasn't able to defend my point (I wasn't given the microphone) with 'facts' (it is still just an article) and showing the actual source of my point, so here is the link to the article (in Swedish). The story is about that an 'open source' consultant could cost up to 1 500 SEK/hour, compared to 950 SEK/hour for a .NET developer.

Of course, there is not one (1) truth when it comes to prices and it will change over time. My point is still that it could be one of the reasons why a company hesitates to make the change to open source program. Not saying that it's wrong to go there.

Well, at least the temperature raised....   ;-)

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'.

The vast majority of the RE.net (and here) blogs are towards the residential public. Therefore, I'm delighted to find out that ARGUS, one of the largest suppliers of financial software to the commercial real estate industry, has started a blog dubbed 'Global Viewpoints'.

ARGUS describes the blog as;

"This blog is produced by ARGUS Software. The blog will cover a range of topics related to the global landscape for real estate investment and development, and blog visitors will have an opportunity to share their opinions on blog topics. The blog also will serve as an educational tool and provides information including industry reports and recently published books related to real estate, as well as a list of global industry events and links to industry media outlets."

They started of in the early November and has so far been able to produce a large number of posts. It will indeed be interesting reading. Especially with this list of writers.

All those beaches, all the sun, all the nice people, all the good Singha, all the shopping, but there is nothing like home (the office to be honest) when it comes to speed..