April 29th, 2010

The Rise of Neighborhood Search

By Colleen Staunton, Product Manager

The tagline ‘Real Estate is Local’ is often echoed by those in the Real Estate industry. Consumers are not only buying a house but they are ‘investing’ in the surrounding neighborhood as well. They often look to see if there are others with kids the same age as theirs, what the closest schools are, and where are the places to eat. All of these things are part of a neighborhood’s make-up.

In an article posted by Matt Carter on Inman News, Name your neighborhood: the new wave in real estate search, he discusses the growing importance of neighborhood search. While more and more real estate portals/brokerages are trying to implement this type of search, the concept is far from new. Onboard has for years talked of the need to provide consumers with the right type of information. This includes giving them insight into the local community, or neighborhood. Onboard clients Washington Post and Redfin are a few examples of clients of ours that use neighborhood boundaries on their websites. Others, like Prudential Douglas Elliman and NY Post provide neighborhood profiles using neighborhood level demographics, as opposed to the usual zip code level demographics.

Matt Carter pointed out how not everyone is in agreement on what the actual boundary of a neighborhood might be. Washington Post is a perfect example of this. They prefer to define their own boundaries since they feel they have the local knowledge. Onboard is able to easily geocode their boundaries and provide the matching community information. This site allows the user to research the neighborhoods and see the polygons laid out on a map all together. When searching for houses in a neighborhood on Redfin’s site the user will see the distinct outline of that neighborhood. Their listings are then shown within that neighborhood. Both use boundaries for slightly different reasons but are highly effective.

Washington Post Neighborhood Boundaries

Redfin Neighborhood Boundary - Back Bay, Boston

Another option is to allow users to ‘find’ what neighborhood is best for them. This is especially helpful in bigger cities or when home buyers are moving to new areas. They may know what they want in a neighborhood but may not know where to look. Giving users the option of selecting from a set of lifestyle criteria will result in a much better search experience.

Neighborhood boundaries are really only the tip of the iceberg. Brokerages and real estate websites have many options when they consider their website strategy. Implementing neighborhood boundaries means you must also have the appropriate neighborhood-level demographic, school and market information. Users will want to know how many single-family homes are in the area, what the crime rate may be, which schools are in the immediate area and also what some recent home sales have been. For those that do not want to implement a map search on their site they can easily tag their listings with the neighborhood and link that to the relevant content.

The advantages of allowing users to search by neighborhood are extensive. You can improve your SEO while becoming the neighborhood expert. It’s no longer acceptable to just provide basic census data at the zip level on websites. Realtor.com and Zillow, who both offer their users neighborhood level search, are the top two sites in US internet usage for the Real Estate category, according to a Hitwise February 2010 report. Combined they account for 10% of the market. The Top 20 contains a number of other sites that have one or more neighborhood features on their site, including #3 Yahoo! (profiles), #6 Trulia (Search, boundaries and profiles) and #20 Redfin (search, boundaries and profiles). Consumers are very savvy and will ultimately go elsewhere to find the information they are looking for if your site does not offer it.

Tags: neighborhood boundaries, neighborhood data, real estate mapping, real estate neighborhoods.

March 25th, 2010

Listings Web Service Pre-Wired for Touchscreen Search

By Scott Petronis, Senior Director of Product Management

Joel Burslem at 1000watt had a great post yesterday about the potential for application developers in using Apple iPad. Multi-touch technology, as Joel says, will bring back simplicity in search.

Case in point: Yahoo’s new Sketch-a-Search application. A user can draw on the map to “lasso” results and confine their search for places of interest to specific regions.

Finding lunch near our office is now as easy as creating a fingerprint.

The adaptation of touchscreen and multi-touch services for real estate search will depend on the flexibility of the content it is attached to.

It’s worth mentioning that our Listings Web Service is equipped with the capabilities to take advantage of rich search experiences quickly.

Onboard’s Listings Web Service allows you to send in a polygon and retrieve all the listings within that polygon, whether it was drawn in a computer browser or on a touchscreen.

In addition, applications built with widely available services like Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search, Google Maps or Bing Maps can be easily integrated with our web service to deliver a cutting-edge search experience. The developer simply needs to capture the polygon created in that app and send it to our service.

These advances in mapping applications will continue to help reduce development time and effort. Keep in mind, most of these devices also have GPS capabilities so a latitude/longitude point can be quickly determined so the user doesn’t have to input anything. Of course, the Onboard Listings Web Service also accepts a point and radius to conduct a search. For more accurate results, the service also approximates drive times and walk times so people can search for listings within a 20 minute walk from where they’re standing, for example.

Tags: 1000watt, Listings Web Service, mobile, mobile real estate, neighborhood search, search polygons, Yahoo Sketch-a-Search.

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, mobile sites, 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.