God, Obama, Superman and Me

Giving Up on the L Word

Looking through the archives, having conversations with agents about their business practice, I realize I've ruffled some feathers. No, I've really pissed some people off by using the 'L' word. Calling anyone who uses databases of representative listings a 'liar.' I've tried to make it clear that there were valid reasons before BRH came around to not maintain a live inventory database.

The pace of change in rentals is breathtaking. Units come in, and are rented, sometimes within hours, sometimes before you can even do the data entry. The commissions are a tenth or a twentieth of those in the home sales industry—so there's a reason there's a MLS for sales and not for rentals.

None of this changes the fact that, if a business now chooses not to invest in our service, and instead uses 'representative' listings, they are now engaged in a process which creates what our new president might call 'misrepresentations and misconceptions.'

If agencies wanted to label this type of system with a disclaimer that read: "These properties are representative of the rental stock we have available. Take a quick look, and then come on down and we'll start making calls and see what we can show you" I'd be cool with that.

You're a part of the REAL listing revolution by being transparent about your process. Explain to people that the pace of change makes maintaining a live inventory non-cost effective. Tell them that so many units are so indistinguisable from each other that it's really OK to re-use photographs and listings. Just do it.

Craig's Button Encourages Misconceptions and Misrepresentations...

When an agent posts to Craigslist there's a button that refreshes each listing's time stamp, shoves it back to the top of the CL pile. Now tell me, you're an agent; you don't get paid to post stuff to Craigslist, you get paid when you move a unit. You do a pile of data entry Monday morning. Those units start renting. Do you take them off Craigslist? Or do you save a few minutes, and just keep hitting the button to send them to the top of the pile?

Lisings posted to CL via our technology never, ever, get shoved back up to the top of the pile. At OMB, the only way a listing gets shoved back to the top of the pile, rises to the top like cream, is when the property owner sends another email or fax listing that unit as being still available.

Could we just refresh everything every day? Sure we could. Some agencies do! They have databases of properties that have last update date of that morning. Every morning.

Huh? How does that happen? Do the landlords call in every morning? All 700 of them? All at 9 am? Does the agency have 700 receptionists? Oh, maybe it's a magical software thing. That's it. yeah, those landlords are all hitting that magical button.

Every morning. At 9 am. They all roll out of bed and hit that button at the same moment. (Perhaps they've been infected with some sort of Borg implant that makes them all one huge hive mind?)

Making the Honest Buck

Anyway, I'm not God (I bet you knew that already). I don't know what is in another man's heart, or mind, when he says something that I know isn't true. He could be very very stupid, or misinformed. He could be insane, or delusional. Maybe Bush really believed there were weapons of mass destruction, even as he cooked up the evidence for them. That's possible.

And ultimately, the agents who may or may not be enagaged in spreading the misconceptions and misperceptions didn't build this system. They're just trying to make a buck in it. Like everyone else. Like us.

But the way we've chosen to make our bucks is to get you, the apartment hunter, real, live, fresh, tasty, delicious rental listings. You can't get them at most realtor sites. You can't always get them at Craigslist. (You might, but then, probably not.)

You can always get them at OMB.

If you see a half dozen properties with the bright green lozenge, something time stamped this morning, you know the owner told us this morning that the unit was still on the market. This wasn't a clinically depressed broker hitting a button on a property he posted five days ago, saving a few minutes work. This is BRH at OMB, data sellers, pushing a fresh listing to the top.

Smell our listings. Take a bite. They're the real McCoy.

You have our word on it.

The Future of Web-Based Apartment Hunting

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

The personal is political. When we talk about a little thing like web-based apartment hunting, we find ourselves talking about the professional ethics of the broker / agent comunitiy, about how changes in technology produces changes in human behavior, and about the future of that change, the direction in which we are trying to steer the web. We steer the web by choosing which sites to use. What comments to write. What products to buy. Together, we are building the future of the planet on the web.

To some degree, though, the web grows by itself, obeying its own logic and its own laws, driven by the underlying realities of human nature and technological innovation.

To really understand what is happening at Craigslist and OnMarketBoston you need to understand lots of things. This isn't about hitting you over the head with marketing messages; we will try to do that when and where we can, but the truth is, we're more focused on the building of the better mousetrap than marketing.

But, as many a technology company can attest, if you fail at the marketing, your product will fail, your approach will fail, and the world will remain unchanged. So we're trying to do both things at once here, and at the network of blogs and websites we're creating as the mandatory SEO (search engine optimization) necessary to make OnMarketBoston a viable commercial entity.

Why a Rental Listing System Will Arise

So I'm going to briefly outline the shared understanding needed to understand why OnMarketBoston (or something like it) will come into existence in the next few years, and will organize the patchwork quilt of rental offices into a single efficient entity, the holy grail, the fabled Rental Listing System.

What's in it for apartment hunters you ask? They will be able to search a real-time, online database of properties, just like homeowners do, without being lied to, bait-and-switched; without driving all over town looking at ratholes which even the broker opening the door has never seen.

Does that sound good? Then read on. Or just go to OnMarketBoston and start shopping. If you understand why Less Is More, and why you want to shop at the aggregate portal with the smallest number of listings, just go. If this confuses you, keep reading.

Documents and Databases and Something In Between

A lot of the potential value of the web is locked up documents. Word-processed documents; spreadsheets, logs, scanned documents, in hundreds of different formats, each one individually crafted by a unique human being. The problem with documents is that searching for data in them is a pain in the ass. To extract the value from this form of data, you pretty much have to sit down, read the whole goddamned thing, and take notes. It's a scholarly enterprise.

That's why we have databases. Databases are organized—very organized. Making them is a ton of hard work. They have to be pruned, maintained, updated. They get sick and die and must periodically be restored from backups. A database is a garden. It must be tended with love by talented people who care about the content, who understand it enough to be able to fix it when the data is becoming corrupted. The problem is, the people who can do this, programmers and DBAs, often don't have the knowledge of what is in there to be able to see when things are going wrong. So you need a team to do this, a team that communicates well.

This team costs a ton of money. Rental agencies can't afford this team, or they just don't know how to project manage the effort. They have "the software guy." The software guy, a jack of all trades, builds their database and their website until he figures out that there's no way to get rich doing this; he has no ownership stake in the business or the data, and he eventually quits, abandoning the effort.

This is one of many reasons Boston has no Rental Listing System.

With our business model we solve the problem, we cut this part of the Gordion Knot. First of all, we can do the work; we consulted at some of the world's largest companies. Not to put too fine a point on it, we aren't people who got a Microsoft certification during the bubble because we thought that would make us rich. We own OnMarketBoston. This is our ownership stake in this market. This is our long-term payoff. We're producing the content as a loss-leader until the RLS is built—by us, or someone else. The products and relationships in place bring in enough revenue to maintain and build OMB; maybe not as fast or slick as we'd like, but if there's anything that Boston Apartments (the web site which looks like it was designed by a bright kindergartner in 1995) has shown us is you don't have to be slick to make a ton of money on the web.

Come Into Our Beautiful Walled Garden—it's free.

For this ownership, we have been willing to create this walled garden—doing all the data entry ourselves. I know what you're thinking. Data Entry? Isn't that the lowest level job in the universe? Isn't that something you outsource to starving people in the developing world? Yes, SIMPLE data entry is something that a business should outsource where possible. But DIFFICULT data entry cannot be outsourced; it must be performed with love and care by someone with an ownership stake in the outcome of that data's use.

Remember the documents vs. the database? This industry communicates with documents. Faxes and emails. Each one is different. Each entity, each landlord, each building management company has its own way of doing things. Translating all those ways of doing things into a single language, and putting the resultant lore into a database, is a soul-crushing, back-breaking job. It may have actually crushed one of our team members. But we've done it, and we're doing it.

Why We Rock, and The Thing In-Between

That is why OnMarketBoston rocks. It has tasty delicious data in it, baked fresh every day. So we're using the documents to build the database. So what is the thing in between a document and a database? You guessed it! It's Craigslist! Craig Newmark, the genius that he is, figured out that something halfway between the perfectly structured data of a real database and the anarchy of individual documents, would work best in this moment on the web. So he owns a huge hunk of internet traffic. He knew that the work needed to make real databases was incredible; you could kill yourself trying to really organize all that human effort. So he created user-flags, so that people could figure out how to get some value out of his partial solution. And CL was born.

Stay tuned for part two of this article: Game Theory, Arms Races, and Apartment Hunting for the Boston Metro Region Apartment Dweller.

You Can't Certify Yourself

We had to laugh when we caught sight of this listing. Yup. This Boston City Properties listing has certified...itself. How adorable is that! The meme is catching on out there on the web that CL content needs some sort of third party verification to be worth looking at.

Here's the thing—no realtor can do this for themselves. They are compelled by the culture they inhabit to behave with the standards of that culture. They cannot unilaterally disarm. Any agency who instantly moves towards total honesty and transparency in the rental market will soon find themselves out of business, unless they have exclusive relationships with top notch property owners.

These agencies with the best exclusive properties, the ones with nothing to hide, can afford to behave with integrity and honor. And some of the actually do.

These are the types of agency we've been looking for to build The Boston Realty Hub network of agencies. They're out there. Places who have built up these kind of exclusive relationships. What we discovered during the last five years is that all agencies claim to have tons of exclusives. Going through their databases and comparing them, looking for the real exclusive properties, we've disocovered that very few agencies have more than 5 or 10% of their inventory as exclusive.

This doesn't mean that agencies without exclusive properties don't have merit. Not everyone wants to shop in a boutique.

But, without BRH, without an outsourced business process which includes the efficiencies produced by our company, BRH (not BCP, nice try guys) agencies re-selling commodity properties simply do not have the luxury of fastidious professional ethics.

They can't abide by a TOU at CL that allows those who most pollute the digital commons to succeed, while they fail. So they don't .

So we're doing our best to change things on the ground, to make transparency profitable. We want to make the good guys win. We think it's an admirable thing. We're willing to work like crazy, barely breaking even on our operations, for years and years, to get this ball rolling. And it is rolling. We can see it moving, every day.

We live in interesting times. And that's not a bad thing.

What is a REAL Rental listing?

A REAL listing is any listing that you see on the web that you also see in person.

It can be hard to tell if you've had a REAL listings experience. Agents are very good at avoiding the specifics of how their databases are collated and maintained. Some simply do not know themselves how the system works.

But the reality is, Apartment hunters waste a lot of time with listing databases that, beyond a rough sense of the big three (price, number of beds, rough locaiton) are useless Potemkin Villages of model units. The databases contain REAL properties mixed with vague representative listings. Photographs of empty rooms may be accurate, inaccurate, or used over an over again. These photos are shot in such a way that there are no distinguishing details. Just hardwood floors, white walls, and window frames with shades drawn or blown out, overexposed blocks of light. The units could be anywhere, in any number o buildings. That's what the photos are supposed to show. This is a commodity. LIke the photograph of pile of chicken wings on a laminated menu at Chilis.

You don't ask, "Will I be getting THESE EXACT WINGS? That one looks exceptoinally plumg and juicy!"

There's nothing sinister about these photos. I've taken them myself for clients. If you expose for the interior of a room the window gets blown out. These rooms are featureless.

The REAL Listing Revolution

In the old days, nobody really expected rental real estate listings to be real.

At least, not the listings by big agencies in newspapers. People understood that they wouldn’t be asking to rent that exact apartment. After all, a million copies of the listing had been delivered on paper that morning to a million people. Of course you understood that if you called on the phone, that THAT unit had rented already. So the agent cross sold you. And you didn’t mind, as long as it didnt’ feel like bait and switch. As long as the agent got you something roughly comparable to what you’d seen in the paper, it was a good deal.

It wasn’t like rental listings were being instantly posted to some magic newspaper you could read while it was being printed.

Then came the Intertubes, and Craigslist, and rental listings were suddenly being posted to a magic newspaper—and each and every unit had a time stamp on it.

This was a game changer for the rental industry. Or, it was for part of it—the smarter, more ethical part.

Suddenly, a new way of doing business became possible. The problem was, how could businesses keep the river of data flowing through their offices current? The answer might seem simple to someone unfamiliar with the industry.

Get a PC. Get MS Access or Filemaker Pro, and start doing data entry!

The problem is, you could go broke, and many places have, doing all the data entry for all the information that is emailed, faxed, phoned, or available via building management company website.

Well, then, you could hire a ton of agents, and make them do it themselves as a condition of employment.

The software infrastructure for this turns out to be a challenge. What’s worse is that every single broker you hire is another opportunity for bad data. Redunancy, inaccuracy, and violations of equal opportunity housing laws. One broker writes that a unit is great for a family with young children, and boom, you just got fined. So you can’t scale the data entry with extra brokers.

So, if you can’t do it as a clerical task, and if you can’t scale the data entry with inexperienced untrained brokers, what can you do?

The answer is BPO—business process outsourcing. Find a trusted third party to maintain the data.

The Boston market needs this solution because of the way it’s constituted. A crazy mix of huge building management companies, super-landlords, and lanlords with one, two or three units. Each building management company works with many agencies. Each agency takes a few bites out of each building management company apple.

Do you want to do 1000 units worth of data entry when you’re only going to rent ten units a year? No way. Life’s too short; especially for brokers with no data culture.

So the end user becomes the impetus for change. They call on a unit the second it is posted. “Can I rent that unit?,” they ask.

The agent launches into the usual story, “well, that unit just rented, but we have plenty like that—”

Click.

“Hello?”

The prospect just hung up. He figures he’s being bait and switched. He can see the unit was posted ten seconds ago. He’s been burned by agents before. He’s gone to the next place. If the agent tells him he can see THAT UNIT, and there are pictures of that unit, he’ll make an appointment.

This is how the REAL revolution starts. Like all revolutions, from the bottom up. From the grassroots.

We’re proud to be a part of that revolution. Some day soon, renters will have the same right to real information that homebuyers using a real MLS have. We’re going to make that happen in this city, in the Boston Metro Region. Other people will make it happen in other cities, in other ways. Real estate is local. Huge franchised operations will not make this happen everywhere at once.

It will grow, as the original Home Sales MLS did, spreading through markets, until the entire market is organized.

Oh, there will still be games, there will still be manipulation, humans being what we are. But it will be much much better than the fake listing system we use now.

Renters deserve the same courtesy given buyers. REAL Listings. It’s going to happen. Soon.