I had a really insightful chat with Gord at the Greater Vancouver Real estate board yesterday. Since boards own listing photos, I asked about the implications and the likelihood of photos being placed under a Creative Commons license. Gord responded with a more interesting question, “How would licensing them under the CC license benefit our members (realtors)?â€.
Well, I said, opening up the photos leads directly to more listing exposure, it’ll help sell more real estate. My sneaky answer was really a segue to asking about putting all listing data and photos under open licenses and allowing for data aggregation. That’s really what all I’m aiming for. More open data to use to build cool data tools.
It turns out that things are a little more complicated than that. In my first post on the State of Real Estate and the Web in Canada I made five points on why I thought it is so hard to get listing data. I was planning on a series of follow ups discussing each point in detail and summarizing with a possible solution. However, after yesterday’s chat I think I found the solution that would solve them all.
The key is that the real estate industry exists to increase and maintain the consumer value of sales agents (realtors). Anything that devalues them is ultimately detrimental to the industry and thus prevented.
Opening up the listing data and allowing for unbridled data aggregation is considered extremely hostile to the consumer value of sales agents. If anybody could build a tool, using your data, that puts you out of a job, you would do whatever you could to prevent it too.
The problem is the zero sum mentality of sales agent value. Empowering consumers with powerful data tools has as a direct negative effect on the value of sales agents. It is this win/lose model that motivates many decisions to build the “walled gardenâ€. Understanding that, the solution to data aggregation is clear, find the win/win model where opening up listing data empowers both sales agents and consumers. A clear solution, but not a very simple one. I’ll follow up with some ideas in the next few weeks.
Instead of allowing “unbridled data aggregation”, perhaps they would be more comfortable with an access list of people who are allowed to subscribe to the feeds.. by using HTTP Authentication of some sort.
Provide the data in an open format, but restrict access to it, and wrap the process for gaining access in comprehensive licensing agreements. That could be a step in the right direction.