Hi all, and thanks for having me here on PropertyChat. It looks like a really nice community! I'm a software architect by day and after going through the home buying experience a couple of times I've been frustrated by the process and lack of good tools available. I'm looking to learn more, help others where I can, and ideally build some software to make our lives easier!
Hi James, I've got a software engineering background myself. I'm wondering what sort of tools you're thinking about? There are actually a lot of really useful tools available, but not really viable for consumers to have subscriptions or own given they only purchase very occasionally. Consumers can often access a lot of these systems via real estate and finance professionals who do use them on a daily basis.
Hi Peter, nice to meet you! There were a few areas in particular... Property search - we are accustomed to Real Estate & Domain but there's got to be better ways to search for property. I was frustrated seeing the same properties over and over and not being able to easily collaborate with my wife on the search. Also quality of data (units being listed as houses, new developments listed as established, etc) Financial forecasting. Specifically being able to compare two options side by side and see how they play out over time. Being able to do this myself rather than rely on my broker to do it for me. Education. Had to read a lot of articles & books to get a clear picture of the process & financials. In this case it's probably too many fragmented tools rather than too few
The challenges you've described aren't easily solved. Some of them are a lot more complex than most people appreciate. One thing that probably is achievable, has kind of been done but could be done better is property searches. It is possible to scrape the internet listings and build your own database and search engine. Collate this with other data sources with an open interface and you could probably build a very powerful and useful tool. This has been done to some degree but I think it could be improved on and made available to the general public. A few buyers agents have built these types of systems but it's either not publicly available at a cost accessible to the consumer, or it's quite bias to the business that's promoting it. Financial forecasting has been done, but it's never very good. Given the complexity of the problem and the barriers to a solution, I don't know if this will be solved any time soon. Those that do offer it usually have an agenda. Education is probably best addressed by open forums such as this one. So yeah, take a look at what you could do with property search engines!
