We hear it everyday: “I hate having to enter my data into multiple websites”.  It seems like such an easy problem to solve, but when it comes to data, why is it so hard to share?

Information is the key currency of the commercial real estate industry.  Having the right data is essential to success, but compiling and maintaining it is extremely costly.  As a vendor, possessing the data gives you power over those who need it and that’s easy to monetize.  So it makes sense that companies like LoopNet and CoStar take ownership of the data and don’t share.  It’s good for business, but forcing practitioners to waste time moving and re-entering data hurts the industry.

Since our master plan is to organize local communities, we don’t struggle with this issue as much.  For a market to be truly successful, information needs to flow in and out of local listing services, company websites, economic development websites, publications, contact databases, analytics engines, etc.  Sharing data strengthens a community, and we’d like to see more people come together.  To that end, we’ve spent a lot of time giving users as many options as possible to publish and extract their data.

What we’d really love to see though, is a data standard — a common format that would let data flow from place to place without all the usual headaches.  A few years ago, we were part of an OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate) work group whose goal was to create a data standard for commercial real estate.  The idea was to come up with a standard XML definition that made sense to the various disciplines (brokers, appraisers, etc.), and the benefits are pretty compelling:

• Minimize data entry of property for sale or lease into multiple marketing sites (From multiple times to single entry);
• Cutting costs of data management. With a single data export, all marketing channels will be able to be kept current.
• Improve data quality. Providing data definitions will contribute to better data quality and easier data interpretation.
• Improve the ease of data management. Providing data in a consistent format will allow data originators and receivers to more readily manage data from different sources.
• Re-purpose data for other activities. Data formatted for OSCRE CIE purposes can be used for other business activities, saving time and resources formatting the data and interpreting the results.

After making some great strides forward early on, bureaucracy started to drag on the progress.  A rough standard was published in some form last year, but doesn’t seem to be available now and we haven’t heard a mention of it since.

Data Portability isn’t going away, and I fully believe it’s only a matter of time until the industry gets it’s act together.  But how long must we wait?

Update:  It looks like I might have just been out of the loop.  I saw this story today:

OSCRE Rocks CIO Roundtable at Realcomm 2008: The Interoperability Showcase

“If you doubt the work of OSCRE (Open Standards Consortium of Real Estate) or, even worse, have never heard of it, you should have been at the CIO Roundtable at the Realcomm Conference in San Diego on June 9. Interoperability was “alive-and-well” when more than 200 real estate IT executives watched live demonstrations of 3 of OSCRE’s 7 Standards for the real estate industry conducted by the members of OSCRE.”

That’s good news!  I’ll update this post again if I can get a copy of the specification.