At CREA’s AGM on March 22nd, members are going to vote on proposed rule changes to appease the Competition Bureau. These changes let home sellers choose the services they want to buy from an agent (i.e.: it puts more options in the market.) More openess in a market is a good thing so let’s also open up the data to help home buyers.

Sidenote: I haven’t read any articles regarding real estate agents being 100% commission based. This is an important thing to remember, if they don’t sell a house they don’t get paid…try and find a lawyer who works like that.

Is it too late for the Competition Bureau to think about Open Data?

The Competition Bureau could have, and may still, greatly increase innovation in the Canadian real estate market. Opening access to real estate-related data, which is inevitable, would benefit everyone in the home search process. Major cities in Canada (Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton, and more) and around the world (such as San Francisco), have opened up their data and the citizens of these cities have benefitted.

Open access to this real estate data would be a great thing:

1. Open up access to historical home sale prices
2. Reduce barriers to showing listings on 3rd party websites
3. Recommend that CREA open up Realtor.ca to 3rd party widgets

Opening access to these three pieces of data are smaller changes than affecting a Realtor’s © commision. And adding innovation to an industry is always a good thing for the consumer.

With access to more information, websites like HomeZilla, Zoocasa, and View Point Realty could provide better research tools to home buyers. Home buyers being able to find a home they love is at the heart of any real estate industry. Helping home buyers would help the entire real estate market.

This is Canada, let’s keep everything fair; if the sellers of a house are getting a benefit then so should the home buyer. Let the innovation accelerate!

How do you feel about Open Data in real estate?

For companies like HomeZilla, Zoocasa, ViewPoint, and others changes in the industry can only be good. For consumers, more choice is always better. But if you are one of 98,000 agents, then change makes you nervous.

Every industry hates to see government intervention and they usually put up a great fight (ex: Microsoft & ATT). Usually, the industry in questions puts together a fantastically crafted message and repeats that message again and again. (This worked especially well for Obama and George W. Bush)

That is why I was shocked to see a ‘rough’ interview by CREA president Dale Ripplinger on CBC. In fact, I double checked the page to see if it was a REAL CBC page. Here are some of the questions and awkward answers are:

Q. And the average commission is how much?

A. There’s no such thing as an average commission.

Q. The one most of us have paid is around six per cent.

A. Yeah, well, we don’t comment on commissions because the Canadian Real Estate Association doesn’t get involved in negotiations between our members and their clients. If a realtor won’t work for what a client is willing to pay, then that client has to find another realtor who will, and believe me, they will, because there’s lots of competition and lots of choice.

Isn’t the average commision of a real estate agent common knowledge? Even more importantly, doesn’t CREA know exactly how much agents make on each transaction? Being evasive about provable numbers isn’t going to help CREA’s case in the public’s eye.

Q. Well, it’s not me that’s putting this forward. It’s the Competition Bureau, which doesn’t often get up on its hind legs and roar like this.

A. I’m not sure what their motivation is.

Q. What would the motivation be beyond taking care of consumers? What do you think is.…

A. We’re taking care of consumers by providing service that brings confidence to Canadian consumers when they handle the most important transaction of their life.

For such a big and common question, you would think that CREA would have a better crafted response. Real estate agents pay a lot of money in dues to support their board structure and I have to assume they would be concerned with these type of interviews.

Could it be possible that CREA wants the Competition Bureau to shake things up?

You can read the entire CBC interview here.

1. Google’s will move into Canadian Real Estate – Google already has 10K+ Canadian real etate listings (ex:Halifax listings) and they don’t promote their service in Canada. Are you ready for ‘the Google affect’?
2. CREA or TREB will face another lawsuit – the Internet (like the fax machine was) is a disruptive force in the real estate industy. With the Canadian Real Estate industry dragging it feet, we expect to see another lawsuit.
3. Online real estate research will get easier – home buyers do more research, before talking to a real estate agent, every year. In 2010, with ZooCasa, HomeZilla, Google Maps, the iPhone and the opening of GeoData new home buyers are going to know EVERYTHING about a neighbourhood.
4. Vitural Real Estate will start emerging – the progression of visual aids in home buying: photos, photo tours, videos, video tours, now HD video tours and the next logical step Virtual Real Estate displayed on Google Earth and the iPhone. VR homes will make a big change to how people research houses.
5. Local Knowledge will become vital for listings – OpenData Toronto, OpenData Vancouver, HomeZilla, and Yelp all home buyers to know more about their neighbourhood. To keep home buyers on your listings they need to have local knowledge. (see HomeZilla Hoody)
6. Mortgage rate will go up – Canada can only ‘print money’ for so long before inflation hits. Once rates start going up in 2010, they will go up quickly!
7. Yet another Boom/Bust cycle – there will be a mini boom/bust in real estate when mortgage rates hit around 7.5%. Home buyers will rush to buy homes before a the big rate hikes and if they don’t get in they won’t buy for a while.
8. Online Advertising – 2010 will be the year where a large number of real estate agentswill move beyond the “just having a website” to “having & promoting their website”. If you are paying $50 a month to have a website, shouldn’t you spend at least $50 a month to promote that website?
9. Blackberry Usage – less then 5% of real estate agents will give up their Blackberrys for iPhones. Why change what is working?
10. iPhones become a big real estate aid – When home buyers have questions… well… “there is an an app for that”! Consumers are flocking to the iPhone so when a consumer goes to an open house, drives around a neighbourhood, or has questions about sales history they will ask a Realtor but there will also ask their iPhone.

At HomeZilla, we love when things come together. In 2010, the convergance of technology, open data, empowered home buyers, rising house prices, rising mortgage rates, decreasing costs of data will have a HUGE impact on the Canadian Real Estate market. And in our opinion, all the changes should be for the better!

During the year we will follow up on these topics will longer blog post but we would love questions or comment over the holidays. And of course, what are your predictions for 2010?

Happy Holidays Everyone!

We have already integreated Toronto’s Open Data for Parks and Toronto’s Open Data for Child Care. Both of these data sets have increased the quality of HomeZilla’s data.

The Toronto Parks data added 28% new parks to HomeZilla’s database and the Child Care data added 5% new locations. But the real benefit for HomeZilla is in the data maintenance. The City of Toronto will be producing this fantastic information and saving HomeZilla the cost of collecting the data.

Of course, with any new source of data there will be little problems with usage. Luckily with Toronto’s Open Data HomeZilla there are ‘good’ problems. Usually the problem to draw bounding lines by hand; I don’t have a painter’s steady hand. But with the parks data the biggest problem was the Rosedale Ravine Trail, which is huge, was broken into eight segments.

So, HomeZilla had to decide:

• what is the centre point of the park?
• should we combine the eight polygons?
• should we list it as eight different parks?

For us, they were FANTASTIC problems to have so hats off to the City of Toronto.

To help contribute to the community, HomeZilla has converted two of the ESRI Shapefiles into KML files for people to download. These should be great quality because of the source but we make no promises so use ‘as-is’ but we would love feedback.

You can down load the KML files here:

• Toronto Address Points in KML source Open Toronto.
• Toronto Parks in KML source Open Toronto.

Go Open Data!