The software industry is big on knowledge sharing. It’s part of the reason that software development and simple but useful applications have become mainstream. Techdirt has a post around the GNU GPL that got me thinking again around freedom in real estate.
Real estate is as locked down an industry as it gets when it comes to data and process. The only other industries that might come close are legal and media. The big players are all about proprietary processes, systems and databases. The smaller players are all about unique local market knowledge. It’s understandable how we got here but not an ideal state given the current nature and direction of most other industries.
The irony of this is that most real estate information is publicly accessible. How large buildings are, where they are and who occupies them are all matters of public record. The costs, vacancies and trends of markets is aggregated by every real estate organization and published monthly or quarterly so that anyone could be a combined record of historical market performance. Labor and population estimates are captured and reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau to indicate the direction of a market’s real estate needs. All the information is there and free! Yet somehow no one has put it all together and released it in a standalone tool.
The dirty secret of our industry is that we all use the same data, but no one admits to it or is willing to change the game by making it available.