Open Source Software for real estate — obstacles and opportunities

(Jan 2018 update — PropertyWebBuilder is raising funds via opencollective. Please help support open source in real estate by making a contribution to here: https://opencollective.com/property_web_builder)

The real estate sector is a strange beast. It is obviously large and involves a lot of money — a sector you would expect to attract innovative technology. The truth though is that it suffers from a reliance on antiquated technology.

The quote below from this hacker news conversation captures the situation best:

I literally sit within a company run by excel spreadsheets, talk on a phone with brokers, manage market information via printed pdfs of comps, mark up site plans by hand and scan them, and conduct all reporting via email and word docs to multi-billion dollar pension funds.At nearly every step of the way I see opportunities without the technical expertise to execute.

The problem is two sided. On the supply side (technology providers) there is not a lot of incentive to innovate. On the demand side (people who use the the technology — brokers, realtors etc.) there is a failure to appreciate what technology can offer.

Technology providers are not under pressure to innovate as they are easily able to lock-in clients to their tools and services. This is particularly true when it comes to building websites. It is not a technologicaly challenging task yet realtors will pay thousands of dollars for a website and hundreds more each year for maintainence.

Once a realtor starts working with a particular product the cost of changing to another platform increases with time. Once past this point there is an incentive for the technology provider to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) to keep clients from switching.

On the side of realtors (for the sake of simplicity I will use this word for all individuals or organisations that sell real estate) the issue is largely about attitudes. For many in the sector technology is an afterthought and something they would like to spend as little time as possible thinking about.

This may be a generational thing. This NAR survey shows that in 2015 the median age of a realtor was 52 -not exactly digital natives.

It may also be to do with the very nature of the sector. Selling real estate is about being opaque and hiding as much information as possible from everyone else. This attitude seems to get applied to technological choices too. I have looked hard and found little evidence of realtors working together to improve their tech stack.

Open Source can be the change that the real estate sector needs

The best way realtors can work together to transform technology in their sector is by embracing open source.

When one realtor in some way or another contributes to an open source project a competing realtor might stand to benefit but that is way less important than the overall benefit to the sector.

The biggest threat to realtors today comes from companies that seek to make them altogether redundant. Companies like Redfin, Zillow and Trulia are stealing more business from realtors each year. Such large companies can afford to outspend any realtor or broker. It is in the best interest of realtors to work together to defend their turf.

Embracing open source in the real estate sector is also an opportunity for developers. These days many of the smartest developers are motivated more by fun, interesting projects than by money alone. Open source has a good record of attracting talented individuals. Right now many of these developers do not have much reason to explore projects in the real estate sector.

The magic of open source is that it saves people from repeatedly solving the same problems. This creates a virtous circle where new contributers can be more productive by standing on the shoulders of others. This in turn motivates them to also contribute and bring in more talent. Once there is a real estate open source project that goes beyond a certain level of success it can bring this virtous circle to the sector.

I came to these insights myself through a series of unplanned events. Late in 2015 I developed PropertyWebBuilder, a tool for creating real estate websites. It was a project I started without doing too much research (a friend convinced me it was a good idea). The decision to open source came at the end of 2016 after I realised it wasn’t likely to be very profitable as a closed source business.

I have thought about ways I could monetize the project directly but as I have come to understand the sector better I realise that it be a lot than just a source of revenue. Over the next few years I want to grow it as a platform that introduces talented developers to the sector and changes the attitudes of realtors to open source.

Its a long shot but worth shooting for. And so far it is going in the right direction. In the months since its release it has picked up steam, gaining over 100 stars on github and plenty of positive feedback from those who have tried it.

You can see the source code here on github: https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder or have a look at the marketing site here: http://propertywebbuilder.com/

I am convinced that a good open source project that gains traction in the real estate sector could go a long way to changing attitudes and move innovation forward at a much faster pace. Here’s to hoping PropertyWebBuilder is the project that brings that change ;)

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