In his autobiography, Steve Jobs speaks about the intersection of humanities and science as the driving force behind innovation at Apple and his belief that the reason Apple resonates with people is that ‘there is a deep current of humanity in our innovation’.
In terms of innovation in property, the first half of the previous decade witnessed a plethora of online innovation, staring early on in the century with the likes of Rightmove, Findaproperty and Primelocation. These companies dominated the market in the UK’s online property business, with Righmove emerging as the colossal favourite and in 2006; their IPO achieved a market cap of £500m.
2006 also witnessed the emergence of Google Maps technology, which spawned further the maps ‘mash-up’ revolution, with extate.com; Nestoria, Zoomf, Trovit, OneOneMap.com all leading the way in the UK and Europe. Perhaps the US was a little slower to catch on, probably because of legal issues with MLS, however in the UK, most agents seemed fairly comfortable with the idea of having sites crawl their servers for data, provided of course, the crawl sites reciprocated the agents sites with tons of traffic.
Later on that year, Tesco and Asda got into the act, launching their own brand of on-line estate agency, which appeared to be the wave of the future. Sites back then continuously tried ‘vertical innovation’; with some using technology to target specific demographics, including gays and women. Not one to be left out of the party, and especially since everybody seemed to be using their technology, Google jumped on the bandwagon launching its real estate service, at first discreetly in 2006 and then more direct in 2009.
The reality today, is that most of the companies listed above, including Google, Tesco, and Asda are no longer in the online property business; what happened? Yet some of the smaller players managed to survive and even grow during the most severe economic decline since the 1930’s.
What makes a company innovate and grow during a recession I believe - as Steve Jobs suggests - is humanity interacting with technology. In a recent interview with BBC, Mark Zuckerberg admits to blending psychology, humanities and computer science in creating Facebook. Following Zuckerberg’s example, if a technology company is to truly succeed in impacting the way property is transacted, they must first find a way to better integrate the psychological and humanitarian aspect of the standard property transaction with the technological advances they are looking to introduce.
Of course there are a few companies who recognize this and are doing a successful job in integrating the two disciplines; however none have truly mastered the integration, therefore there is an urgent need for a company to recognize the true impact of psychological, humanitarian and technological integration and what that can mean for the average property consumer and potentially for the company’s bottom line.
This article was written for I Am The Agent by Harvey Edgecombe. He is publisher of Renthusiast.com and senior partner at a London based project finance consortium. He can be reached at harvey@renthusiast.com