Organized real estate in the US is something over a half
million people scrambling to protect a franchise they see threatened from all
sides.
Three years ago we thought we'd provide a solution with dynamic web sites running off a database of
listings, but most real estate business are too small and too technophobic to
host their own site. The regional boards have a decision making process that can
be counted on to make the worst possible technical choices. The big success in real estate portals is
HomeStore, but look at a Weekly
Standard article for a view on that.
Eventually we matched our solution to the way the real estate business works; highly distributed, yet providing for
aggregation; local origination and control, but integration with national
players (e.g., for mortgage and other financial services); document oriented,
with access provided using search engine technology. Essentially, we mapped
the WWW onto real estate and embedded its business rules in XML.
We are driving this vision forward by pushing for industry
acceptance of open XML schema standards and by letting the world know that portals are not the only way.
Slashdot Mirror
The portal approach to aggregating real estate listings is doomed. It doesn't work the way the web works.
There is a technical description with a nice animation showing how we think it will evolve.
Organized real estate in the US is something over a half million people scrambling to protect a franchise they see threatened from all sides. Three years ago we thought we'd provide a solution with dynamic web sites running off a database of listings, but most real estate business are too small and too technophobic to host their own site. The regional boards have a decision making process that can be counted on to make the worst possible technical choices. The big success in real estate portals is HomeStore, but look at a Weekly Standard article for a view on that.
Eventually we matched our solution to the way the real estate business works; highly distributed, yet providing for aggregation; local origination and control, but integration with national players (e.g., for mortgage and other financial services); document oriented, with access provided using search engine technology. Essentially, we mapped the WWW onto real estate and embedded its business rules in XML.
We are driving this vision forward by pushing for industry acceptance of open XML schema standards and by letting the world know that portals are not the only way.