Property and Web 2.0
April 16th, 2007 by Dan Roberts Just a thought today!
The appropriateness of applying Web 2.0 principles to travel and tourism is intuitive. People love to talk about their trips, share advice, photos, stories and relive the adventure, while at the same time implicitly helping their fellow travellers make the most of their travel. But can Web 2.0 philosophies be applied to real estate? For example, if you see a property that you think is a great deal to buy you certainly are not going to tell anyone, are you?
My first thoughts are that there are elements that could be investigated - for example, wiki style contributions on the best way to purchase a property, or getting builders and engineers reports etc. I have seen a number of consolidator sites - but I have never given any thought to how this content is maintained - do these sites used meta search technology in the same way as leading travel meta search sites like Kayak and Skyscanner do?
Tags: Web 2.0
April 20th, 2007 at 6:29 am
I think most site use screen scrapping technology to retrieve the content. It is how we do in Trabber (http://www.trabber.com) but the technology can be applied to any type of content. The mantainance is pretty a nightmare.
Regards.
April 20th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Your site is for flights - and you say you use screen scraping. Do you then have a contract with the flight/travel websites that you refer to for a referral fee or similar? What is the revenue model?
I understood that most of the big metasearch sites like Skyscanner and Mobissimo actually integrate directly into many of their airline partners databases for flights via their own proprietary aggregators etc. There is an interesting article by Forrester Research called “What Travel Metasearch 2.0 Must Do to Win” (April 2006) which discusses the cost to the airlines of the metasearch companies hitting their sites and some of the Travel 2.0 ideas that these sites will need to take on board to continue to compete with the online travel retaillers. Some of the interesting things that the article suggests are mash-ups with maps etc., such as on Kayak.com, better comparative interfaces (including AJAX interfaces), more information than just the flight info (such as menus or bad seating options - such as on SeatGuru.com), and of course user generated content (such as wiki discussions on the difference between flying into Heathrow or Gatwick).
Given that reviews and ratings of property for sale is unlikely to ever be a hit, surely some of the Travel 2.0 principals could be applied to a property metasearch site; in particular, better comparative interfaces of properties you might be interested in, user generated discussions on neighbourhoods and public transport or schools etc., and even information about realtors and auctioneers?