WIRED Report Public Launch

 A couple days after my last post in September '10, a couple of events occurred that had me re-thinking a fundamental premise that had been driving WIRED Reprt development since the beginning. After mulling things over for a few days, I decided to postpone the WIRED Report for Realtors effort in favor of a more simple launch for the public at-large.

That decision caused six months of retooling and, until now, there has been little to talk about with respect to the business side of LandMetrics. But today, I tweeted the first "hello world" marketing messages for the shiny new website, thewiredreport.com.

In addition to being available to the general public (in our coverage area), there's a new engine under the hood and reports are now being generated in 15-20 seconds (they used to take a few minutes).

Also, instead of a single 12-page report, there are now 4 reports with different levels of focus.

The first two, the Market Quarterly and the Large Market reports, are free and they cover larger areas. Market Quarterlies will be posted on the coverage pages, so anyone looking for general information about their market see how the market moved in their region over the past quarter. The more local Large Market report examines the area within four miles of a specific address.

The next two, the Local Market and Neighborhood reports, are more local and are available for a small fee which will vary a bit from place to place, depending on what it costs us to get the data. The Local Market report details the market with a single mile of the property and compares it with the Large Market stats to show, in a general way, how the market conditions change as the focus becomes more local to the specified address. The Neighborhood Market is more local still and it tools at the subset of houses in the Local Market that occupy the same statistically-modeled "neighborhood" as the home at the specified address.

The concept of concentric market regions—as well as a brief introduction to other technical aspects of the report—is discussed in more detail in a technical overview which has been posted on the website. There is a less rigorous introduction as well.

Stay tuned. More soon.

The Business vs. The Project

For years, when someone would ask what my company did, I would fumble a bit and then say something inelegant about market analysis, property valuation, etc. My day-to-day work was writing code in my basement and my research involved analyzing market data, so I'd say enough about that to get through an introduction and the topic would change. And, of course, it NEVER came back around to what I did for work.


My wife once explained to a friend that she didn't really know what I did when I was working. Her friend said that, where she was from, that meant you were in the mafiaa. I said, "The mafiaa is a myth and its existence has never been proven in a court of law." I have a twisted sense of humor.


A few months ago, while researching a business plan for my wife's optometry practice, I had an idea for another project similar to the WIRED Report but involving the local business landscape instead of the local real estate market and targetted toward businesses rather than REALTORS® and their customers. I filed it away, under things to do once the WIRED Report gets legs, has other people seeing to it's care and maintenance, etc.


More recently, I was listening a podcast interview with an executive at Tom-tom and the executive mentioned something off-hand that I realized was the missing piece of the puzzle for making my post-WIRED-Report idea feasible. While revisiting the idea and committing some of my thoughts to paper, it dawned on me. I'd figured out what my company actually DID. Eureka!


LandMetrics builds systems like the WIRED Report!


Put more generally, LandMetrics builds systems that leverage the GIS and spatial analysis tools available to large organizations for the benefit of individuals and small businesses!


Helll-ooo, elevator pitch!


It'll still glaze eyes during an introduction, but it's mercifully brief.

Roots

My last post started with "When I started this project..." That was four years ago and "the project" is a relative unknown to anyone that might happen upon this blog. I'd better back up a bit and fill in the gaps as to what this project really is.

The WIRED Report is a tool for real estate valuation. It scratches the same itch as all the mortgage AVMs (automated valuation models), Zillow's ZEstimator, HomeSmartReports, and several others. It just scratches A LOT deeper.

It became a PROJECT when I tried to use the existing valuation tools to analyze properties I was considering purchasing. I was a real estate investor at the time as well as a programmer and systems administrator for Terralogic, a now-defunct company that produced online GIS applications for government agencies.

When I realized that I couldn't extract enough useful information out of Zillow, HomeSmartReports, and the like to make informed decisions about any single property, I went to work. My partner in the real estate venture was also a colleague at Terralogic. We chewed through data and we compiled reports on properties. We used them to convince ourselves to buy one house and not to buy several others. We used them to convince bankers to lend us money. Ultimately, we used them to convince ourselves that everything had gotten way too expensive for our business model to work.

At this point, however, the WIRED Report was just a process...not a business idea. We were just using ArcGIS with a well-polished dataset and we were managing to find a bit of insight here and there that helped us make purchasing decisions.

The business idea came a short time later, after Terralogic went under. I had decided to go the consultant/entreprenuer route. My original BIG IDEA had to do with specialized computer appliances targetted toward GIS departments. In a roundabout way, I had been introduced to Jim Flowers of VT KnowledgeWorks. In a single conversation, he convinced me that selling anything to government would be something just north of a nightmare and that bringing to market the better valuation mousetrap might be better worth the effort. Besides, I already knew how to build the valuation software, right?

I said it would take a year to get a "finished" product out the door. It sounded like a long time. Now three years past that original ETA, I've released a private beta (code for: functioning and useful, but still not "finished").

My wife really is a saint.

Data, Data Everywhere

When I started this project, data was scarce. FOIA laws were new and local government didn't think much of them. I was fortunate to have located a market where I could get a regularly updated dataset to use for development.

On a computer named "hydra" I'm running a data processing monster. It's been rewritten 5 times before. It takes datasets of any form, from anywhere, requiring any convoluted procedure to acquire and manages the complex task of converting them into a continuously freshened coverage areas for the market analysis engine.

I'm making calls and sending emails. "Assessor's office, please."  I'm looking for more coverage areas, new ways to feed the hydra.

And the news is good. Local government is now used to requests for data. There are still a few that charge prohibitively high FOIA fees, but there's less of them now. The responses I'm getting are encouraging.

The hydra is purring. The latest new coverage area got integrated in under two days. The first one took months.  Another few markets under my belt and I'll get it down to two hours.

When I first talked about the idea that the hydra is built on, I think my exact words were: "Sure we could build one, if we had infinitely large piles of time and money.  Failing that, I'd say it's impossible."

:grin: