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Finding the perfect house using open data

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Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#91

Post by gdudeman »

Dwolb wrote: post #58
gdudeman wrote: post #47

This is awesome. I love analysis like this. Funny enough, something very similar to this was the impetus for me starting Estately. Early on, we had a bunch of wild spatial queries that would let you even filter by distance to specific transit line stops: http://blog.estately.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/near_tra... When we ran stats on what searches people were actually doing, we found that very few consumers actua…

Did you ever try to give people the option to filter by school district or school district ranking?

We let people search by specific school and we are considering adding school district ranking soon. We've had a bunch of users requesting it.

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#92

Post by Dwolb »

gdudeman wrote: post #91
Dwolb wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever try to give people the option to filter by school district or school district ranking?

We let people search by specific school and we are considering adding school district ranking soon. We've had a bunch of users requesting it.

seems like one of the big factors that affects property values. maybe since it's so important some people would rather search by top school within a radius or boundary than know the district ranking associated with the house.

Re: Finding the perfect house using open data

#93

Post by GlennKelman »

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…

This is Glenn Kelman, Redfin's CEO. Thanks for using Redfin and glad to hear that we gave you a jump on getting a place.

To answer your question about Zillow, Trulia and Redfin: Zillow and Trulia are media portals; Redfin is a brokerage, started by software entrepreneurs but with our own real estate agents to represent people buying or selling a home.

As a brokerage, Redfin has complete access to the local Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) used by brokerages and their agents to list homes and record sales. In addition to MLS listings, Redfin shows for-sale-by-owner listings, foreclosures, and new-construction listings, but most of the listings on our site come from MLSs.

There are hundreds of local MLSs, each with different data publication rules, but nearly all MLSs only accept as members brokerages willing to contribute their own listings to the MLS database. As a result, Redfin has the most complete and most timely listing data of any major real estate app or website, but only covers about half the U.S.

Zillow and Trulia get some listing data through services that syndicate a selection of listings from the MLS and some by asking real estate agents to upload their listings. A variety of studies, sponsored by Realtor.com, ZipRealty and Redfin, have shown that Redfin and other MLS-powered sites have significantly more agent-listed homes than the portals; Redfin also gets data much sooner, both to show new listings and to recognize when old listings have been sold.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/on-big-real-estate-...

Hope this helps to answer your question! Best, Glenn

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