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.