February 10th, 2010

Looking Under the Covers at the NYC Market

By Peter Goldey, CKO & CIO

The Inman Connect show in NYC this past January included a panel focused on using data to understand and forecast the NYC housing market. Sitting on the panel were two chief economists, a provider of active listings metrics, and yours truly. The room was packed, and Brian Boreo of 1000Watt Consulting led us through the presentations. We had each been asked to produce a single slide illustrating how our company looks at the marketplace.

The Panelists

Mark Fleming - Chief Economist, First American CoreLogic
Mike Simonson – Founder, Altos Research
Stan Humphries – Chief Economist, Zillow.com
And me – CIO at Onboard, Folklore and Mythology BA and Olympic Curling enthusiast

The Approach

I’m not an economist.

I am a data junkie and trend analysis enthusiast.

Stepping back, I took a moment and considered what content the other panelists were likely to focus on. All of us have access to essentially the same types of content including:

· Public records
· Listings records
· Search metrics

I surmised that Mark and Stan would likely focus on what I consider “near past actuals” by looking at sold data tends (volume, price) and perhaps listing volumes and days on market information, either as a snapshot or trended over time. This type of content paints an accurate picture of what has just happened in the marketplace, generally reflecting buyer activity on market prices sixty to ninety days aged (the typical time between agreeing on price and the transfer and recording of the transaction). The trend lines created are typically projected into the future as a predictive tool. I also figured Mike would look at listing activity metrics trends such as list price trends, price reduction activity, days on market and volumes. This listing activity content is more of a forward looking indicator as it provides information about properties that are likely to transfer in the next sixty to ninety days but relies significantly on pricing data which actually indicates what the seller thinks – or perhaps would like – their property to sell for. We’ve seen periods where list and sale price vary hugely and other times where they are close in proximity.

The analysis the panelists provide on top of this data was informative, timely and well understood by those familiar with typical housing statistics.

But I felt there were other ways to look at this…

Look at underlying factors, not end point results

At Onboard, we also look at all the numbers, statistics and trends we can in sold data, tax basis, distressed property volumes, pricing trends, listing activity and construction data. The issue with looking at these as predictors of the marketplace is that these data points all represent past activity and are, in turn, the result of buyer/seller decisions, the availability of money and other underlying factors. The key to predicting the market is in accessing the drivers that impact what a buyer/seller will do rather than looking only at what they already did.

We believe that understanding the underlying factors and then applying local market knowledge is a different and meaningful perspective that can, when combined with a hyperlocal analysis model, provide startling insight into why the market is behaving as it is and how it is likely to behave in the future. This insight must be reflected against the actual local market activity (once it occurs) on a continuous basis.

During the initial financial turmoil two years ago, we were approached by a number of private and government concerns regarding how one can identify housing risk as a local level. With Onboard’s hyperlocal modeling expertise and access to data, we were able to approach the problem from a number of directions.

Ultimately, we created a forward looking housing distress index which provides comparative information between local markets. This allowed us to look at the health or deterioration of underlying housing distress factors of any city, county or neighborhood and identify – relative to other parts of the country – how the area is likely to perform. This was a critical concern for anyone analyzing a portfolio of properties for either investment opportunity or relief direction as it provides a basis for comparing area risk. Typically this local area risk is then considered against specific property risks (mortgage details, resident credit, etc.). We looked at a large number of data points over time and found that the following – in combination – provided a locally reliable evaluation method:

· Vacancy and occupancy data
· Employment statistics
· Household income
· Change in HPI (home price index) from highest value
· At risk mortgage origination volumes

In each case, we considered the change in these values over time and the velocity of that change relative to the larger marketplace. The results were normalized to a 1 – 10 index with low values signifying indicators of continuing distress and high values indicating little or no such indicators when compared to the national landscape. We found – within reason – that these values forecasted activity in the marketplace so long as both global market factors and local knowledge was applied on top of this analysis. Global factors might currently include the federal home buying incentive and low interest rates. Local factors might include knowledge of new construction units soon to hit the market or a large factory closing.

Over the past two years we’ve compared the results of this model statistically to three, six and nine month trailing indicators (sales volume and pricing, days on market, foreclosure volumes) and found a surprisingly tight correlation.

Visualization

If that explanation left you cross-eyed, take a look at the map image below. It represents the underlying Q2 and Q3 2009 factors and we believe predict conditions for the current and near term market in NYC. When compared to the previous forecast, the model predicted the uptick in sales and the reduction in gap between list price and sale price experienced in much of the market during the recent 4th quarter.

To analyze this map, the dark areas indicate a stronger market where houses are likely to hold their value through the sales cycle, inventory is not flooded, and the number of properties in distress relative to overall inventory is likely to remain low. Lighter areas show significant downward pressures on the market. Depending on where in the market correction cycle the local market is, this could mean significant foreclosure activity will continue or simply that properties will be slow to move without some discount. It is at this point that local knowledge must be applied – something that Onboard believes the local broker and Realtor are uniquely positioned to do.

The level of detail here is to the neighborhood and block group level – a very fine level of analysis made possible by the application of Onboard’s geography model to all the underlying data points supported by specific spatial analysis techniques. The result is that one can see the market differences between Jamaica, Queens and the neighborhoods that border it.

What we don’t know

This model appears to work well now and for this type of volatile marketplace. This same volatility makes some traditional analysis methods (Case-Schiller, etc.) less reliable in our opinion. When the market stabilizes or during a period of rapid price increases, it is unclear whether this model will continue to offer value as a predictive tool. It is likely that we will find additional underlying factors that need to be considered during an up market.

In the meantime, it’s fun to look at….

Tags: distressed properties, foreclosures, Inman Connect, Inman NY, NYC foreclosure activity, NYC housing market.

February 8th, 2010

What is an API?

By James Wilson, VP of Development

First… it is an acronym

API is an acronym which means Application Programming Interface.

What is it?

It is a contract that allows computers to talk to each other. Another name used widely is a protocol which is a set of rules that must be followed to exchange information. By “talk”, I mean the ability to ask a question and get a valuable answer back.

How does it work?

A really smart computer person (a developer) defines and builds a system that accepts questions (request for information). Next, that same developer writes instructions (the contract or protocol) that must be followed in order to properly accept questions so that the valuable answers can be computed and returned. Another developer, somewhere else in the world, reads the fascinating and tantalizing contract documentation. She then sets out to build a unit within her own system to ask questions at the proper time. Her system then uses the subsequent answers to deliver great value to that system’s end users.

What should be in an API’s contract?

1) Location, Name and Protocol

• Mechanism or protocols to be used to establish a connection. These are typically another lower level type of API or contract.
• The address or location of the system that can answer the questions.
• Name of the service.

Let’s give an example of a typical business to business (B2B) scenario. Just below is a URL or web address used to locate a service which finds nearby pizza delivery services.

http://www.pizza-store-locator.com/service/find-the-closest-pizza-delivery

The protocol used is established with the text: “HTTP”. HTTP is another acronym which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is another contract which specifically defines how a web browser, like FireFox or IE, can communicate with a web server. Many higher level business services are built on top of this lower level API.

The location of this API is defined as “www.pizza-store-locator.com“. This type of string is typically called a domain in web parlance.  A domain is always associated with an IP address. This is a unique identifier and allows request to be reliably routed to the appropriate web server. An IP address is an acronym meaning “Internet Protocol” address. There is that word, “protocol”, again. The whole WWW, World Wide Web, is just a series of layered protocols that allow everyone to talk to everyone else.

The name of the  service is “service/find-the-closest-pizza-delivery”. This name is mapped to business logic, or a program, on the web server in this case that is responsible for formulating an answer. Just guessing, but this service probably helps find pizza delivery services. It is nice when the name of a service is self describing!! That is the sign of a good API.

2) Input Definition

• What questions can be asked?
  • Is there only one questions or different types of questions?
• What are all the pieces of information that must be included in the question so I can answer it?
  • In the example above, for the pizza delivery service, what information is required to find the closest pizza delivery shop? The contract could specify an address is required like 90 Broad Street, Suite 2002, New York, NY.  But it could also just be a latitude and longitude.
  • Lets keep going… how far away are you interested in searching? 5 Miles, 10 Miles or do you care? No, you don’t because it is not you that must do the driving to the pizza shop so… perhaps you only want a certain number of shop results back like 20 or 5? Perhaps you do need 20 but want to have at least 5 different pizza shop options returned so you can get a good selection.
  • All this stuff needs to be defined by the service creator based upon research by a product manager into how people actually think and what they want.
• How should all of those pieces of information be structured?
  • There are many ways to send information to the service.
    • We can send it as query string parameters.  For example..
      • http://www.pizza-store-locator.com/service/find-the-closest-pizza-delivery?LATITUDE=108&LONGITUDE=-47&number-of-different-types-of-shops=10.
    • We can send it as XML
      • <latitude>108</latitude><longitude>-47</longitude><number-of-different-types-of-shops>10</number-of-different-types-of-shops>

3) Outputs

• A description of the answers that can be returned
• Format of the answers
• Exceptions or errors that can be expected
  • A good API will defined all of the possible bad scenarios that can occur and how it will notify the calling program. This allows the calling program to respond gracefully.
  • Here are some examples to possible bad return results:
    • Not enough information was submitted, and here is specifically what was missing: the latitude.
    • The service is temporarily down.
    • The service is too busy, please try again later.
    • No results were found.
    • Results were found but not as many as you asked for because we only search within a maximum distance of 10 miles
    • This service has moved to a new address…
    • …and so on…
  • Typically each of the possible errant answer is give a unique identifier or code which allow computers to respond easily.

An “out of this world” example…

Do you remember “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” when the scientists first started communicating with the huge alien ship that came over the mountain? Sure you do… who can forget this brilliant movie that is now such a fundamental part of the fabric of our existence. Well… in this movie, the scientist use mathematics manifest through sound and lights to try to establish basic communication with the aliens. Once the alien understood, they repeated back the message to say to the scientists, quite loudly, “Yes, we heard you!” An interface was established, an agreement that if you flash your lights and send over sound waves, we will capture that information, process it, and send you back beeps and blips along with flashing light signals too (and the result of this will be that we land our ship and change the very nature of your lives!).

References

I have listed some common websites to give other definitions of an API; however, they commit some of the cardinal sins when defining a entity.

1.     Wikipedia

1. Sin! - They use the object in the definition itself.

2.     How Stuff Works

1. Sin! - They use the noun in the definition itself.
2. And worse still they limit the definition of API’s to web technologies.  It is important to understand that API’s are EVERYWHERE… for example… inside a computer, API’s are established to allow software to run  successfully on a computer’s hardware which has nothing to do with the web.

Tags: API, Application Programming Interface, James John Wilson, James Wilson PMP, Onboard Informatics, What is?.

January 7th, 2010

Census MMX: This Time It’s Personal

By Joe Rugolo, Director of Data Operations

The dawn of a new decade is upon us. Wow…seems like just yesterday I was getting ready for the non-event that was Y2K and now 2010 is here. For those of you keeping track at home, this also means that it’s time for good ol’ Uncle Sam to send around those two pound envelopes containing your U.S. Census form. As if being constitutionally obligated to fill out and return this wasn’t incentive enough, the Census Bureau is kicking off its “2010 Portrait of America Road Tour”, a $340 million publicity blitz that they are hoping will increase awareness and calm fears as to what the census population count really means. They are even planning on airing two commercials during the Super Bowl pregame show. My fingers are crossed that these ads have either Peyton Manning or monkeys in them. Everyone knows that either of these are comic gold when it comes to TV advertisements.

The Census Bureau is putting up $340M to show they've come a long way from here.

I, for one, think that this is a great idea (the Road Tour, not my commercial proposal).  Taxpayer money has been tossed around carelessly for years; everything from the recent bank bailout to the continuous funding of space exploration. Yeah, we get it…the sun, the moon, the stars. All very nice. Show me video of a real live Ewok and I’ll be impressed. But I digress. My point is that there are several reasons why this type of initiative could payoff for data geeks like me in addition to resulting in better appropriation of government funds (I’ll be focusing more on the former).

Refresh of Stale Data
Think back to the year 2000 and then think about how much has changed since then. Tiger Woods had a squeaky clean image, an iPod sounded like something an alien would pop out of, and when you thought of the term “hybrid” the image of a centaur or dog-faced boy would pop into your head before that of a car. So how can we rely on data that is 10 years old to provide us with accurate info for making decisions or performing statistical analysis and projections? How many housing developments have you seen spring up in your neighborhood and the surrounding area, especially during the real estate boom? Look back on some of the awful events of the last decade that have pushed people from their homes. All of these events need to be accounted for, and the more precise the reporting, the more useful the data. The fact that the census only happens once a decade makes this even more important. There isn’t a lot of room for error here because there won’t be another opportunity for quite some time (10 years to be exact).

Improved Sample Size
There’s an old adage that says that one out of every 10 people is nuts. So think of nine people that you know and if none of them are crazy then you must be the one. But expand that to think of 11 people and maybe there’s a slight chance that you aren’t the one. Move on to 20 or 30 and all of the sudden you can justify your sanity a little bit easier. The same can be said with increasing the sample size of the census (ok, so my example was a bit of a reach).  In a perfect world, 100% of the country would be represented by census data and we’d have an exact picture of the U.S. population, if only for a moment. That is completely unrealistic. More realistic would be an improvement over the mail return rate of 67% from 2000. As long as any gains shown represent a somewhat even distribution across the country then this would be seen as a positive. The closer this percentage gets to 100, the more confident a user can be in the data that they are consuming. I imagine that one concern would be that any gains in the response rate would come from specific pockets of the country where extra attention was paid, which could skew the overall results.  However there are people way smarter than I am analyzing these types of things, so I don’t think there’s reason to panic.

New Data Available
As an avid “Seinfeld” fan, I’ve seen pretty much every episode about a hundred times. In one episode in particular, George buys a sweater for Elaine that he knows has a spot on it because he can get it at a discount. This becomes a running gag throughout the show and hilarity ensues. If you think of the 2000 census as the sweater, then the 2010 census is taking several measures (or at least there are measures proposed) that would remove this spot. Things like tallying results from married same-sex couples, counting prisoners in their communities as opposed to where they are incarcerated (proposed), or increasing the representation of the Latino community would all go a long way towards painting a better picture of what is going on out there. A change in methodology would make trending a little bit more difficult but it would be laying the foundation for more accurate reporting in future censuses.  Tradition isn’t an excuse for not making change, especially at the expense of accuracy. If the country’s current landscape warrants a change to the data that needs to be captured, then so be it.

I know the census isn’t a perfect system but at least efforts are being taken to bring about some positive changes. You can do your part by fulfilling your civic duty and sending in your forms after you receive them. It’ll be 10 years before you have to do it again and if movies about the future have taught me anything, it is that in 2020 everyone will have robot servants to fill out these forms for them. That and hover-cars.

Tags: 2010 Census, census data, population counts, population data, U.S. Census.

November 16th, 2009

Onboard Powers Real Estate Mobile Apps

By Megan Murphy, Marketing Manager

We are excited to release, Onboard Mobile, our newest product platform providing real estate companies with access to property listings and community data, enabling their development team to create custom mobile sites and applications.

With more and more real estate companies getting into the mobile app space and having been in the business of providing real estate data for almost a decade, it only made sense for us to put a mobile platform together.

Key features  include property listings, real-time photo web service, community demographics, school information, home values, home sales trending, home sales transactions and local establishments. The platform is compliant with the most innovative GPS capabilities, such as the ability to show users the proximity to schools and nearby businesses while they are out touring homes.

Benefits of Onboard Mobile

Tags: applications, iPhone apps, mobile sites, Onboard Mobile, real estate and mobile, real estate mobile apps, smartphones.

September 23rd, 2009

RE Webmasters Introduces New IDX Search Plugin

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Specialist

Yesterday Morgan Carey of Real Estate Webmasters received an astounding response following the release of REW’s Demographics for IDX Listings plugin using Onboard Informatics community, school, and amenities data. This demographic and neighborhood content accompanies each listing to give brokers and agents powerful local market expertise though REW’s optimized websites.

To accompany the release, REW is offering major production and site enhancement discounts for the first 100 subscribers to get their hands on the plugin. For those who have not yet implemented IDX and REW site design, they are also providing discounted installation packages along with the plugin.

Morgan explains the feature’s potential for site owners:

“If it isn’t obvious I am really excited about this new feature, and more importantly all the possibilities that now have opened up through our relationship with our various data vendors, in this case Onboard - now that we have this data licensed and available in raw form, this application is just the tip of the ice burg.”

Let’s take a look at an implementation on REW client Marc Rasmussen’s site. A simple IDX search led me to this luxury property in Sarasota:

When a client wants to see what surrounds the house, they can look at Local Neighborhood Info, as displayed below:

As a potential buyer (err…someone who enjoys pretending they can afford beautiful waterfront houses), I discover via Google mashup the property’s proximity to a farmer’s market, chapel, dogsitter, diamond store (perfectly suited for my imaginary lifestyle), and a bakery among local schools and other amenities. I can also infer this is a tight-knit community based on its stable population and lower turnover rates. The characteristics of my neighbors, typical temperatures, and proximity to colleges and sporting events are listed clearly for me.

Real Estate Webmasters is an Onboard value added reseller partner equipped with real estate’s most trusted local content to enhance their programming capabilities, as they have already done for Marc Rasmussen of Michael Saunders and Company. REW’s design expertise is transforming home search with the power of showcasing the look and feel of a community.

We won’t get ahead of ourselves, but there are a ton of exciting features in the works for REW customers.  Stay tuned on Morgan’s blog for details and updates.

Tags: home search, IDX search, local content, optimized websites, Real Estate Webmasters, REW, VAR.

April 9th, 2009

The Onboard Way - Improving GIS Boundaries

By Peter Goldey, CKO & CIO

Onboard Informatics has been providing high quality, precise shapefile boundaries for our defined neighborhoods for several years now.  These files are available in a number of widely used GIS formats and provide the shapes needed to build heat maps and other displays detailing content for neighborhoods* in hundreds of U.S. cities.  One of the great things about these boundaries, is that they were built to follow coastlines and other features making them suitable for map overlay display on websites and reports.

* We use this term to mean well defined, understood areas like SoHo in NYC and The Mission in San Franciso.  Other providers often represent census tracts and zip codes as being neighborhoods.  To use, these fail the test since the average person on the street doesn’t have an understanding of the area covered by a zip code or census geography.

We also utilize a great many boundary files sourced from the government as raw materials for some of our content aggregation.  Over the years, some of our clients have asked us for these boundaries so that they could map the zip codes, places or other geographies for which we provide community content, home sales aggregates, or business and school location information.

Reluctantly, we provided these files.  We were reluctant because we don’t find them to be of sufficient quality to meet the overlay standards we have for areas that we define ourselves.

Over the last few days, our content team decided we could do better.  The results are looking so good that we’re going to deliver them out to our existing clients.  The concept behind the clean up is pretty straight forward:  trim the shapes to underlying geographic information.

To illustrate what we did, here are two images of Census Place level boundaries.  The first shows how the boundaries look on a map before any Onboard processing and clean up.  These shapes are created by the government, and for their purposes the ugly overlap with water bodies and other features is irrelevant.  But they are highly relevant to real estate and media customers.

New York City is unrecognizable in the raw file shape

These shapes are really unusable for map presentation purposes.

Now take a look at the cleaned and processed shapes Onboard has created:

The harbor, the Sound, and all the detail on the coastline - like magic!

This side project was initiated by a member of our team who knew we could do better, even though we’ve never had a request from a client or utilized this boundaries in our own map displays.

That’s the Onboard Way.  We go above and beyond.  Way above, and way beyond.

If you are a current client interested in receiving these boundaries, please contact your relationship manager.  Anyone else interested in understanding more about this or any other Onboard capability, drop us a line.

Here is one place you can find our neighborhood boundary files displayed on maps:

Realtor.com’s Neighborhoods Site

- Pete

Tags: GIS, mapping, neighborhood boundaries, shapefiles.

March 23rd, 2009

Form & Function: Continuing the Debate of UI vs. Functionality

By Robert Hahn - VP, Marketing

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

-Louis Sullivan

At a panel discussion I moderated recently at RE Tech South on “The Future of Real Estate Search”, a very interesting point was made by the assembled panelists.  (And it was a rockstar-filled panel: Corey Kozlowski of Diverse Solutions, Rudy Bachraty of Trulia, Andrew Tillman of Center for Realtor Technology, Greg Tracy of Blueroof.com, Dan Woolley of Dwellicious, and David Carroll or softRealty.com)

The question was whether UI (user interface/design) is more important than Functionality (the actual search logic/behavior).  The panelists were nearly unanimous in saying that UI > Functionality.

Greg Robertson of Dwellicious followed up on Twitter with an excellent observation:

@robhahn asks at #RETS would you tell agents to spend more money on a web designer(UI) or a programmer to improve search. Panel says UI.  If panelist agree UI is more important than search then it doesn’t bode well for @robhahn (OnBoard) lifestyle neighborhood search.

Because we were so limited on time (30 minutes to get a discussion with six panelists?) I really didn’t have the chance to get that discussion going.  But that’s what blogs are for, right?

I made a semi-serious point to Greg via Twitter that it wasn’t whether panelists agreed that UI > Functionality that bodes ill for our Lifestyle Listings Engine, but whether they were right or not.  I’m going to argue (surprise!) that actually, functionality trumps user interface when it comes to foundational enabling technology.

Form Follows Function!

Form Follows Function: We All Agree!

The principle that form follows function has been a cornerstone of modern architecture and design for over a hundred years (Sullivan wrote his manifesto in 1896).  And it has been adapted in large part into the art and science of user interface design.

In fact, the entire notion of “user interface design” is premised upon using visual, audio, and textual cues to help a user accomplish something.  Otherwise, it would simply be called “graphic design”.

And I think Greg Robertson would agree with that.  Design is not how something looks, but how it works.

The real question then, is not whether UI/design should be divorced from functionality for the sake of satisfying some designer’s creative urge, (and to be fair, none of the panelists were making this claim) but which takes priority for the real estate web: user interface design or functionality.

On Priority: Argument for Why UI > Function

The strongest argument that UI trumps functionality is that the greatest functionality in the world doesn’t mean jack if it’s hidden behind crappy UI.  If folks can’t figure out how to use a thing, then it don’t much matter what that thing can do.

For example, take a look at this:

Powerful! If you know how to use it...

This is a tool for building and executing SQL queries.  Given any set of real estate data — including listings data — the functionality of a tool like this is enormous.  You can probably find whatever property you may be looking for, narrow down results quickly, and so on.

But it is safe to say that a real estate search site that simply puts a SQL query front-end as its “Find a Property” interface will fail miserably.  Unless you have a specialized practice catering only to database administrators.  In which case you’re probably going to be out of business soon enough.

In today’s real estate world, what determines success or failure is user interface design.  Companies like Trulia, Blueroof, Diverse Solutions, and softRealty spend thousands of manhours and millions of dollars creating compelling user experience for search.  That these websites hold a competitive advantage over a poorly designed site is readily demonstrated by traffic analysis or simply by putting a consumer in front of a computer.

(It should also be mentioned that far too few brokerages and agents pay enough attention to UI design.  Greg Tracy said, after reviewing a circa-1997 website, that it looked a lot like most realtor websites in 2009.)

Functionality vs. Enabling Technology

On the other hand, there is a distinction to be drawn between “functionality” and “enabling technology” — what one might call a foundational functionality.

For example, Adobe Flash is enabling technology.  It enables all manner of other functionality.  Things that could only be dreamt of before that technology is introduced are now made possible.

Google Maps is also arguably foundational functionality, because it expands the universe of what is possible.  It seems to me that the introduction of Housingmaps.com by Paul Rademacher in 2005 was the seminal breakthrough for real estate web.  (In fact, Housingmaps.com may have been the spark that lit the Web 2.0 fire.)

The Original: Housingmaps.com, which triggered Real Estate Web 2.0

After Google Maps (and Housingmaps.com), it seemed that you could not design a real estate website without incorporating listings with a map display.  All of the second-generation real estate websites of today owe a huge debt to the original Housingmaps.com and to Google Maps.

The key point here is that design, and user interface, naturally followed these foundational functionalities.  Once the enabling technology made it possible to put listings information right on top of a graphical map, the user interface had to adapt to make that possible.  Search boxes shrank in size, moved to the margins, etc. in order to accommodate the screen real estate of a map.  Designers began to put links into the pop-up bubbles, and map-based search began to make an appearance.

At the same time, however, as Dan Woolley of Dwellicious mentioned on the panel itself, while visualization of search results took a giant leap forward with the introduction of mapping, the property search itself hasn’t changed very much since the earliest days of the real estate web.  We are still living in the Zip/Bed/Bath world for the most part — map-based search is the sole exception.

Whether it is Realtor.com of 1996 or Trulia of 2009, the paradigm of search itself has not changed much: property features/characteristics within a geographical boundary.

That paradigm is what we have set out to change with Lifestyle Listings Engine (LLE).

Enabling Functionality

Our view is that if we are successful with LLE, we will enable a range of new functionality that is currently unavailable on the real estate web.  And that this new set of functionality is something that consumers are hungry for.

The theory — which we are testing, by the way — is that when people go to perform a property search online, they are actually not looking for a “3BR, 2BA house in 07054 under $700K”.  Our theory is that what people are actually looking for is something like: “Someplace with enough space for the kids, with good schools, that we can afford on my husband’s salary… and boy, it’d be nice if there were some decent restaurants nearby.”

In conversation after conversation — and now, in focus group session after focus group session — we are finding that consumers have a picture in their head of what they want.  Usually, these pictures are very hazy.  It takes time and a good deal of research to go from hazy desires to defined set of criteria like “3BR, 2BA, $700K in 07054″.  The process is filled with frustration, dead-ends in research, and a real sense of powerlessness on the part of consumers.

We think that consumers would use a tool that can more directly translate what is in their heads to results on a webpage.  We believe that this functionality will drive a new period of real innovation in the real estate web.  We think that talented developers and designers within real estate can’t wait to get their hands on a new toolset that will help them deliver new ways to answer consumer questions.  LLE is not, in my opinion, “lifestyle search”; rather, it makes “lifestyle search” possible.

That will require excellent user interface design.  Just as the introduction of mapping (and related GIS concepts) to real estate brought forth a new generation of user interface design, I believe that “lifestyle search” will change the user interface in fundamental ways.

I don’t know what that UI will be.  Is it a single-field natural language search, like Google’s?  Is it a set of dials and levers and sliders, similar to Kayak?  Who knows?  But I do know this:

That UI will follow function.

This is the law.

-rsh

Tags: Google Maps, housingmaps.com, Lifestyle Listings Engine, property search, real estate web, search, user interface design, web 2.0.

March 18th, 2009

What the Experts Have to Say About Data

By Megan Murphy, Marketing Manager

If you’re in the any business backed by data then you realize that regardless how strong your sales team is or how much you spend on a top notch website you’re still only as good as the quality of information you represent.

I think my mother said it best, “garbage in, garbage out”. 

One our our biggest struggles, being a provider of real estate information and solutions, is explaining what data even is and the opportunity cost of using  inacurate ’free’ data.   Over the past year various experts from our company ranging from Marc Siden, our CEO to Data Project Leads, Senior Relationship Managers to our CKO & CIO, Peter Goldey, one of the industries foremost experts on data collection, aggregation and integration have put together some pretty enlightening posts regarding what this data stuff is all about.

…in more technical terms than my mother of course (no offense momma :) 

Chicken or the Egg: Information is Data or Data is Information?

The particular interesting evolution in data has been the advent of images being allowed to stand toe-to-toe with the more traditional quantifiable data (i.e., measurements). In the past images had been lucky to be classified merely as information, but does this mean that information is more important than data? Or had data changed, and in this digital age the fine line between data and information is blurred?

Data in Real Estate (Part 1): Creating Accessibility

Friday, July 25th, 2008 Posted in Informatics | Edit | 1 Comment »

The real estate industry has been affected by the nearly infinite amount of information available through the Internet in the same way that all industries have been. Consequently it is now more important than ever that the information clients receive …

Data in Real Estate (Part 2): Creating Quality

Friday, July 25th, 2008 Posted in Informatics | Edit | 1 Comment »

Having established a foundational knowledge of data and its application to the geographic sphere of real estate, the ability to determine what sort of data will be most valuable for a company’s business ventures is even more important. In the …

Measuring the Value of Information, Part 1 – The Content

Monday, July 21st, 2008 Posted in Geography and Mapping, Informatics | Edit | No Comments »

Whenever you spend money on anything you always should ask yourself a few questions, the first one being, “Is this worth the money?” I am sure many firms consider this and many other questions before making the decision to invest …

Tags: content, data, data comparison, data provider, free data, neighborhood data, quality data, real estate data.

March 3rd, 2009

ERA Re-launches: same great simplicity, more panache.

By Patrick Healy, Senior Relationship Manager

Yesterday, Electronic Realty Associates, Inc., better known as ERA, re-launched their site and with it gives their visitors additional tools and information that previously was unavailable on the old site.

One of the things I have always admired about ERA’s site is its simplicity.  It doesn’t intimidate the end user with all sorts of fancy, over the top, gadgets and overload them with information.  What it does is simply and painlessly lay out information and listings in an easily digestible manner to help a prospective customer make their best decision.

Disclosure: ERA is an Onboard Informatics client and uses a number of Onboard products.  This review highlights some of them but the intent is to call attention to the new features of this site.

This release promises nothing less.  ERA has taken their ideology of simple and easy-to-understand information and incorporated some nice features that are now widely acceptable to just about anyone in the online community.

One caveat, like most realistic businesses, ERA recognizes that this site is a work in progress.  This is not a complete redesign; however a significant portion of the site has been given a facelift with more to come.  With that said, I am going to focus on two topics in particular; search and listings information.

Search

A very nice feature ERA has incorporated into this version of the site is the ability to use a ‘Guided Search’ where you answer questions that are not your run of the mill.  For example living by a particular school or choose a visual area on a map are things you can now use as your criteria.  This is great for folks that really know (or in some cases don’t know) what they want.  Of course, there is your standard parametric search where you can put in your price, beds, property type for those folks that like to search that way.

ERA's guided search proves equally useful for the tech phobic and tech savvy

Once you put in your criteria and get your results you have the option to view these results a few ways:

• Gallery – where you can chose how many properties per page you can view.  Each is laid out in a very simple and clean manner where you can 1) save this in your personal ERA account, 2) send the listing to a friend or 3) view its position on the map.  You also have a number of sorting options here which although pretty standard are a staple in today’s search process.

• List – the more traditional way of viewing properties.  Again, very simple and clean

• Map – where you can see icons of your results plotted on a map.  The addresses may not always show up due to MLS rules but they are all geocoded which is a nice change of pace.  I, personally, am tired of seeing a clump of properties at the point of the place or zip centroid.

As a side note, the ERA development team did a really nice job with Microsoft Virtual Earth API here.  It works great in IE and Firefox.  This sounds very elementary but I have encountered countless implementations all across the web where the interface jumps around a lot and isn’t very useful.  I wind up having to use the navigation buttons rather than scrubbing through the AJAX .  This is one of my biggest pet peeves and usually results in me just leaving the site.

There is also an option on the search that you can draw a radius of the area you would like to search. This is not ground breaking however I don’t think enough sites embrace this style of search. One thing I would love to see is enabling the end user to draw any shape and search in that manner. It would be sort of like creating your own little town or neighborhood. This, I feel, will appeal to more savvy real estate hunters that know exactly where they want to live.

Once you have saved your properties you want to review (or choose to see just one), a click in any number of places will take you to your listing page.  I think this is also true to form for ERA.  What good are great search results if the easiest operation on the page is not getting the end user there?  That is the intent at this point of the experience, after all.

Another thing I would really like to see here is an auto-complete feature that will kick in once you type three or four characters.  This is a fairly common feature out on the web now and I think it really adds a lot of value regardless of how people search.  A great example of this is Google but there are countless others.

Listing

I cannot speak for every listing on the site but, in the areas I searched, this was my experience.  The entire time you are able to refine your criteria and “back out” of the type of results list you are viewing.  Also, there is a small section that is persistent with a ‘save’, ‘print’, ‘email’, and ‘%’ (mortgage calculator) button.  This is a pretty cool ‘utility belt’ that I would like to see them make even more use of in the future. Of course, better listings (and other) information will lead to better functionality and better search. For more on this please see earlier posts on this blog

As you hit the listings’ landing page you are greeted by a very simple yet effective coverflow of all of the available pictures of the property.  This methodology first was made famous by Apple  in last year’s release of iTunes where you can “flip” through all of your albums by cover art (if you have it).  The same applies here.

A coverflow is a great way to showcase a property with oodles of pictures

You also get your basic listing information along with prominent and comprehensive agent contact information. The sub-navigation gives you a myriad of helpful assets to let you further evaluate the listing.

• Map – again, kudos to the dev team for getting this right.  It is visually appealing and, most importantly, functional.  The map is, oddly enough, large.  Go figure.

• Tools – gives you the price, taxes, listing ID, square footage – everything you would need to do a quick and simple cost analysis.  It also offers links to other parts of the site such as the mortgage and financing sections. Lastly, it offers up non-financial-based features/links such as driving directions to the open house, a printable brochure and a way to make an appointment with the listing agent (lead capture).  All very solid.  This helps to take the online user offline and get them in front of the broker/agent.  This is, after all, the goal after all is said and done.

• Photo Gallery – although this may be a bit redundant, it lays out photos of the property in a more traditional fashion.  This will be used for folks that want a larger image then the ones they may have seen in the coverflow on the listings landing page.  Also, folks that aren’t ready for the idea of coverflow will be more comfortable here.

• Neighborhood – here is where much of the Onboard information we provide ERA with is featured for consumption by the end user.  It is, as it’s always been, very simple and very easy to digest.  This section is now very comprehensive yet tab-based so there is no overcrowding on the page while allowing the user to compare multiple facets across communities.My only criticism here is that I would like to see ERA use more dynamically generated graphs (particularly pie charts) and tables here.  This is something that will not distract from the simplicity of the site but will be more fun for the end user to engage with.  It will also give their visitors a better canvas to make use of the community comparison feature also built in here.  I love the idea and I think it will be even better with tandem graphs that generate on the fly.I am sure this will evolve over time since this is becoming more and more important for people searching for real estate.
  

  Community comparrison tool let's you size up areas against one another. Local information provided by Onboard Informatics :-)

  As someone who is in the market for a home I would like to see more information on schools and give me a way to compare those both within the district and across towns. This will aid users in making their decisions and engage them even further, not to mention further increasing the credibility of ERA as a resource that has everything you need to find the home that is best for you.

• Office – This give basic contact information of the office that this property is listed by with one great exception.  Everyone in the office’s contact information is listed by name, office phone, mobile phone and email.  It also provides a tab where you can quickly see, at a glance, all of the listings of that office. This is great.  Each office now has its own directory up on ERA.com.  I would like to see pictures of each agent but it might compromise the succinctness of the list.  Perhaps a JavaScript rollover is in order here. It wouldn’t break my heart if there was a link to use this office as criteria for search and take the end user back to the search and only see those listings.

• Contact Agent – in the spirit of being agent-centric there is a whole section of the sub-navigation dedicated to showcasing the listing agent where one can get all of his/her contact information as well as fill out a contact form to promptly receive an email or a phone call. What’s really good here is that there is no “pushing” in one direction or another as to how the agent will contact you or the amount of information you provide. The end user picks the method they prefer and provides the information that they are comfortable with (a lot or a little) and is not steered in one direction or another. If I were an agent I would be very happy with this section – that is unless I didn’t have a decent headshot.

Congrats to the whole ERA team on these new enhancements.  I know they have been working very hard on this and still are.  Keep your eyes peeled in the coming months for more updates to their site.  They always seem to be the team that comes up with the simple idea that you never knew you wanted (or needed).

Patrick Healy

Tags: community data, data, ERA, Implementation, news, school information, schools, site reivew.

March 3rd, 2009

Defining Lifestyle, Part 1: Content

By Peter Goldey, CKO & CIO

Let’s start with a question:  How does Onboard Informatics define “lifestyle”?

If we’re providing lifestyle search, we must have a clear set of lifestyles defined, right?  A nice neat set of definitions to shoehorn buyers and sellers into?  A concise categorization of neighborhoods with a pretty bow?

Launching a Lifestyle search product raises some interesting questions.  What is a lifestyle?  How can it be defined?  How does it differ from person to person?  When someone in New York says they live an “outdoors lifestyle” how does that translate to a Texan’s vision of the great outdoors?

Happily, those aren’t questions that Onboard need answer.  Instead, we are providing the toolset, the methods and implementation assistance needed by developers to empower end users and real estate professionals to create their personal answers.

Sounds a bit like side-stepping the issue?  I agree.  But this is an issue that will defy universal solution and simple definitions.  We’ve embraced the concept of individualized definition instead.  Rather than focus on labels and preconceptions, our focus is on on delivering the maximum potential for the elegant solution.

The “elegant solution” is a phrase that has become popular as an ideal in manufacturing and process creation.  In basic terms, elegant solutions take the complex and - without compromising quality, features or value - create downstream simplicity in implementation.  We wrap the heavy lifting in easily understood packages and processes so that downstream implementations are straight forward.

The four part equation

We’re looking to break this down to a simple, four part equation with all the values and their relationships defined by users of the lifestyle engine.  While we work with clients to package common search parameters, there is nearly limitless potential for individuals actually finding neighborhoods and listings that meet their individual lifestyle criteria.

Imagine page one of the listings search results being spot on target with what the end user really wants.

So, what is this mysterious equation in four parts?

Content + Context + Differentiation + Control = potential definition.

OK - ambiguous and fuzzy.  You’re going to have to wait on the last three, but lets talk a bit about content today.

On Content

Is content really king? If it’s the right content, at the right moment, for the right person — yep, it sure is.

Let’s use school content as an example.  A typical home buyer will look for a property they can afford within a reasonable commute time from where they work where their kids will go to the best school system they can afford.

Or maybe not.  What if the buyer is a senior?  Or a single twentysomething?  Or a couple with no intention of having kids?  They may want an area with poor schools.  Ok, that’s not accurate either.  They are likely thinking about cost of living, and good schools typically come with a high cost in property taxes.  So, jettison the good schools and lower your tax burden.

No, really - I don't care about good schools... or do I?

But school performance is not the only angle on the relevance of education in the home search process.  Picture the young writer or research assistant looking for a vibrant intellectual community.   Is there a connection between community intellect and school performance?  Educational attainment levels of residents and a measure of the climate that supports intellectual pursuit will be far more indicative of this than actual K - 12 school performance.  Do performance and educational climate correspond?

Sometimes.

Sometimes not.  (think Santa Fe or NYC)

But Santa Fe and NYC both have vibrant arts communities, intellectual community organizations.  New York - never the poster child for public school performance - is a tremendous university center with incredible resources on hand.

The point here is that data out of context doesn’t really provide good insight to the end user.  The context needed includes not just how local areas relate to their surroundings (a very important and missing concept in most search systems), but also the critical context of how the data points relate to the specific end user’s focus, intent and perspective.   It should be clear that the beauty of a neighborhood and a property are really in the eye of the individual buyer.  Delivering the flexibility, context and toolset to developers that provides for personalized lifestyle search is what our product platform is all about.

It will take some time, but when home buyers discover that first system that actually delivers multi-dimensional, contextual, lifestyle search paired with outstanding property detail information an entire new class of qualified prospects will hit our clients’ systems.

In the next part….

I’ll discuss why the right context is so important.

Tags: content, context, control, differentiation, Lifestyle, lifestyle search.