Key part would be finding a website that has the data you need and preferably already asks the lister for each piece of information (so you’re not parsing it from text).

Rob

thanks for your comment. Considering what you mentioned, it may be another whole issue to get something going, once you do have a new and innovative online service - because of existing structures and the way the market works right now.

I guess everything is just progressing a lot more slowly than one would hope for. Finding a place to rent from the newspaper used to be reading 3 or 4 lines of text and I guess that is what it is actually still like in most places.

On the other hand, you have online real estate market places, which offer heaps more information, such as images, floor plans, a map with a push-pin showing the location… However, the way users access this information is mostly restricted to a search/filter interface using combo boxes, and text fields, or the more innovative ones, which allow you to navigate a 2D map to find the push-pins.

I have not really seen a user interface, built on the digital earth idea and an associated virtual wandering metaphor - that’s what I’d love to do - walk around virtually and look for places just as I would walk around a town to get a sense of place and an idea about where I would want to live - except that you wouldn’t be able to see which flats were free and you also wouldn’t have access to all that other information (images, floor plans…) when you actually walk around - unless you own a mobile device with a super innovative location based flat-for-rent-finder service of course.

But who knows, maybe there are already services out there - just that I can’t find them

We discovered some big problems during the research phase. Real estate agents, at least here in Auckland, have quite a grip on house sales in desirable suburban areas. Unfortunately, such suburbs are the most likely to attract Internet real estate researchers/buyers/sellers. The agents maintain lists of houses for sale and will match them up with a waiting list of buyers who have approached their agency. They essentially moderate information flow to prevent a “true” market from developing. Since their entire edge over competitors is knowledge about the local “terrain”, they will act against an online competitor which offers such information on an easy-to-use website. That means the easiest marketing route (partnering with existing real estate agents) was blocked, so we gave up the idea.

If I were to guess, I’d say the successful US real estate online marketplaces target educated people (particularly women) who are moving cities/state and/or like doing the footwork themselves and/or keep a tight rein on their spending. That way the website is as much a “stranger” to the real estate buyer as a local real estate agent. The website might have less information about the target real estate market than a knowledgeable local agent and it’s structured within the confines of a website user-interface, but on the other hand is also much more discoverable via Google searches etc. In a country of 300 million, I’d guess there’s a fairly substantial immediately accessible market using that strategy.

Another strategy would be to provide tools for low sales volume real estate agents to reach potential buyers out of their normal catchment area, in the hopes of piggybacking on their increase sales success.

Of course, the US market is much different to NZ. In the US, the buyer and sell each have their own agent.

Another interesting real estate category are apartments in high density areas. But they have their own issues, such as a lack of available information regarding 3D building shapes, and apartment locations within those buildings.

Anyway, back to it.