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Finding the perfect house using open data

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Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#31

Post by opendais »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #4
cjoh wrote: post #2

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use. It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it…

Don't forget http://www.redfin.com ; their presentation of properties with the associated public data is beautiful. No association, just a huge fan.

Ya, I used them to buy a condo and find my realtor. It was a good experience. :D

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#32

Post by kaylarose »

cjoh wrote: post #2

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use. It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it…

I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me.

For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to fall through when I got an alert from Redfin half hour after sending the offer, that the house was pending. Similarly - I found, toured, offered, and signed on a house (and was alerted to the "new listing", "pending", and "sold" status by redfin) before Zillow even had is registered as "For Sale".

So I am genuinely curious how their feeds differ from the rest. I originally assumed they all just scraped the MLS, but maybe this isn't the case...?

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#33

Post by freyfogle »

aembleton wrote: post #16

Wow; this is great to see. I have recently done something similar in the Greater Manchester, UK area. I've been looking for a house and wrote some code to scrape rightmove.co.uk and zoopla.com to get the house data. Checked their locations against data from http://data.police.uk/ . Checked time to walk to the nearest metro or railway station and time to cycle to work. Metro and Railway station locations were scraped…

You may wish to check out Nestoria's API of property listings and house price trends http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#34

Post by zippergz »

kaylarose wrote: post #32
cjoh wrote: post #2

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use. It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it…

I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me. For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to…

Redfin is an actual real estate brokerage, and are therefore real members of the MLS, with access to the data that provides. The others are simply scraping via publicly available data. This is a major difference.

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#35

Post by zippergz »

Domenic_S wrote: post #29
smacktoward wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, because they generally have their own proprietary source of data ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service ), which is a big part of the appeal of working with a realtor -- they learn of new listings faster than you can by relying on public, "open source" data. And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their database…

> The current state of affairs appears to be that it does eventually flow out to them, but with a significant (1 week+) delay I don't think that's true, at least not for Redfin. According to them: "Homes on the MLS show up on Redfin in 30 minutes or less." - http://forums.redfin.com/t5/Inland-Empire/How-quickly-does-M... "Local brokerage sites like Redfin show homes for sale immediately, as opposed to the seven to ni…

As I described in my other comment, Redfin is a completely different beast than Zillow and Trulia, because they are an actual real estate brokerage. That gives them direct MLS access rather than having to scrape as the other sites do. [I have no affiliation either, but I used Redfin to find my current house and I think they're great.]

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#37

Post by gohrt »

frik wrote: post #6

Great, way to go! Reminds me of Bill Gates book "The Road Ahead" (1st ed, 1995, p. 158) - it's about his vision of a next-gen network that would replace the middle-man beside other innovative things: [...] most market places are very inefficient. For instance, if you are trying to find a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or similar professional, or are buying a house, information is incomplete and comparisons are difficult…

Amazing that the book was written by a man who failed to communicate that (rather obvious) idea to the employees of the multi-billion dollar company he owned and directly managed.

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#38

Post by gohrt »

npsimons wrote: post #30
smacktoward wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's right, because they generally have their own proprietary source of data ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_listing_service ), which is a big part of the appeal of working with a realtor -- they learn of new listings faster than you can by relying on public, "open source" data. And realtors aren't stupid; they noticed what happened when other professions that were built on closed data opened their database…

So basically, you're saying the real estate agents are just the next casualty from the collateral damage that is the elimination of friction in society, and they are doing what they can to remain as middlemen.

Zillow has two sources of data: quality data volunteered by real estate agents, and crap wrong data scraped from everywhere else. MLSes, for all their faults, have rather strict rules about accuracy of their data feed.

The best listings on Zillow already sold, months ago.

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#39

Post by gdudeman »

kaylarose wrote: post #32
cjoh wrote: post #2

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use. It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it…

I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me. For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to…

I'm sorry to hear this and I'd like to get to the bottom of why Estately wasn't updating fast enough for you.

We monitor Estately's feeds very closely. When we do head-to-head testing, we're ahead of Redfin with updates over 50% of the time.

I'll email you for follow up. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#40

Post by gdudeman »

zippergz wrote: post #34
kaylarose wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if Redfin uses the same feeds, but their update times seem vastly superior to Trulia, Zillow & Estately. After spending 1 1/2 years trying to find a house in a turnkey-scarce market, and using RedFin (after it launched in our market a few months ago), Estately, Zillow, and Trulia in parallel - this was the killer feature of Redfin for me. For instance, I knew an offer we had made on a house was going to…

Redfin is an actual real estate brokerage, and are therefore real members of the MLS, with access to the data that provides. The others are simply scraping via publicly available data. This is a major difference.

Close, except Estately gets access to MLS data too. (Founder & CEO here)
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