We’re in the year 2013 and going through a hurried house hunt made me realize how inefficient and poor the process of obtaining information about houses is.
We looked through all the sites and found that even the best of them are nothing but online Yellow pages. Even their text heavy design mirrors this very fact.
A hunt for houses online proceeds in the following manner:
-You pick a couple of areas you’d like to like to live in
-Throw in a price range
-The site spits out crude data matching your request.
-You take contact details for the houses you like and then proceed to a physical search.
-You find that the house doesn’t meet the advertised details
-You bump into agents who usually take you for a ride but give you a shitty but acceptable house in the end.
The sad part of this is that the whole point of the internet being involved is lost, namely:
- There is no rich qualitative content like photos or videos to help you make your decision (just one site has got this right)
- Feedback is absent/Listings are not persistent (I may rent a place and leave later but there is no place i can give feedback about my experience)
- Listings are mostly managed by agents (who (a)Shouldn’t exist in the 21st century (b)Have an incentive to mislead you, extract more rent, show shittier rotten egg houses © Can’t have all the info you need, they’re humans.
- Lack of available information about prices makes you consider the wrong prices as a benchmark. If you can can see the direction i’m going in, you’d realize by now that what i want is a nice searchable graph of all the houses available. You can think of it as a Yelp/Foursquare for houses: each house available for rent is listed here . The listing exists whether it is available for rent or not. The listing is a set of rich information including photos/video walk throughs of the house, it is placed neatly with accurate co-ordinates on a map so you know where exactly it is . There is information from the owner and there are reviews from previous tenants allowing you judge the house well (previous rents can are also listed). Availability is just an attribute for the house object . The actual owner of the house is allowed to modify the entity giving him the incentive to get leads through search (and maintain a better house in the first place) but feedback is for everyone to give . The owner can of course respond to all criticism, thus completing the feedback loop. This kind of a graph can only be possible through crowd sourcing, just like how facebook has managed to build a graph of businesses and restaurants through people updating their profiles and checking-in respectively.
The internet has disrupted a lot of things but looks like the housing/renting industry is still ripe for disruption. This concept can of course be extend to all entities in general. A great extension would be books. I own a ton of books in physical form, some great ones that i’d like to keep forever, some others that may be i’ll be willing to share There are multiple reasons to share books (a) You’re killing less tress (b) You’re getting a return on an asset that was otherwise just sitting there depreciating in value . As i mentioned for houses, “availability” should is attribute for houses, same holds true for books, our goal would be to build a graph for a persons books . Keep the data private as you’d ideally like it and only share it when you feel like it.
And now extend this further and make a nice searchable graph for everything, the possibilities and innovations by mixing analog objects with internet is phenomenal.