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.