Though you expect a light to go on at the flick of a switch, when was the last time you thought about what it took to make the bulb produce light? From power generation to high voltage distribution over long distances to low voltage distribution in your building to all of the standardized components such as breakers, switches and bulb sockets, not to mention all of the labor hours required that went in to enabling you to turn on the light the first time and keep it working throughout the life of the building.
Or have you thought about what goes on behind the scene to book your international flight, hotel and rental car on Orbitz?
The evolution of an idea from concept to design, build, testing, production and adoption of these phenomenal advancements are also being employed right now to take Real Estate out of the dark ages of labor intensive - marginal quality information to that of other industry sectors such as Travel, High Tech Manufacturing, Insurance and even the Meat and Poultry industry who have all made the effort to bring leaders within each of their sectors together, to improve the way they do business as they’re also experiencing the same pressures of domestic and global economics for increased productivity at lower operating costs.
At Realcomm’s CIO Roundtable, members organizations of the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) provided four live over the web demonstrations of what they designed, built, tested and are now putting into production that according to one participant will reduce their appraisal processing costs by 90% and reduce processing time from 5-8 hours to seconds. One mouse click to send the appraisal report, another to receive it. What’s been eliminated is the need for manual data re-entry, data scrubbing and one-off custom integration with every upstream stakeholder.
This major shift in the way we will be doing business from this point in time forward is made possible via OSCRE XML (Extensible Markup Language), taking a very similar approach as other industry sectors who have made the shift and have been reaping the benefits.
In another demonstration of the Appraisal Reporting Standard two major brand name organizations described how they were able to use the OSCRE XML standard to connect their two in-house crafted Excel worksheets. No need to buy new software. One participant expects their downstream partners to eliminate the one-hour processing time required for each of their 25,000 appraisal reports annually.
Similar live demonstrations were successfully perfomed in front of a crowd of over 250 CIO’s for Lease Abstracts and Work Requests/Work Order Fulfillment. Two mouse clicks and whatever time it takes for a message to go between two or more software applications.
These are the first of many business processes needing to be streamlined. OSCRE is currently taking recommendations from members and non-members alike to form new Interest Groups.
Is it just me, or does this seem like a major shift in the way our industry will be conducting business in the very near future?
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Andy,
In response to your closing question in your article, Yes, it may be just you.
Without having seen the demonstrations to which you referred, I can pretty much tell you, this is not anything new. Many attempts to automate portions of the RE transaction have been attempted and failed. Websites where all players in the transactions, like lenders, appraisers, realtors, etc, can work together in a ‘collaborative workspace’ (a buzzword that is nearly a decade old) have been around for some time now.
I suppose eventually the concept may evolve into a working model. Technology does play a huge role now in the RE transaction and reliance on good information on which to base big decisions is paramount. Companies that provide this researched and verified information and the tools to slice and dice it will continue to flourish.
That said, I’m highly sceptical of any claim that one of the most complex processes in the business world will be anywhere close to automated anytime soon
Dear BVance,
Thanks for your email. I apreciate your thoughts and respect your view.
If you are correct does that mean that the member firms supporting the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) are wrong?
AgilQuest
AMTdirect
Appraisal Institute
Argus
BOMA International
BricsNet
Capital One
CB Richard Ellis
CCIM Institute
CenterPoint Properties
CenterStone Software, Inc.
Cisco Systems
Colliers International
CoreNet Global
Cushman & Wakefield, Inc.
Deloitte
FAMIS Software, Inc.
FMSystems, Inc.
Global Office Link
Herman Miller
Integra Realty Resources Kentucky-Southern Indiana
International Facility Management Association (IFMA)
Intuit Real Estate Solutions
Jones Lang LaSalle
Manhattan Software, Inc.
National Association of Realtors
Prudential Investment Management, Inc.
Public Works Government Services Canada
RealCapital Analyitics
Realcomm
RealFoundations
Realogic Analytics, Inc
RSP i-SPACE
Serco
Smart Buildings
The Canadian Real Estate Association
The Situs Companies
Trammell Crow Company
TRIRIGA, Inc
U.S. Department of Defense
U.S. General Services Administration
VFA
Virtual Premise
Yardi Systems, Inc.
In the Architectural, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector of our industry, another non-profit organization BuildingSMART Alliance (www.buildingsmartalliance.org) are creating interoperable data standards as well that are complementary to and planned to exchange information with OSCRE’s. In addition to the many large and small organizations that are on-board as members, many major industry associations (http://www.buildingsmartalliance.org/links_associations.php) also participate to bring interoperability to fruition.
As we’ve seen over and over again, whenever new technology is on the horizon there will be a number of doubters. Organizations who are participating to make interoperable data excahnge standards for the Real Property industry see there are ways to make significant improvments to meet today’s business economic challenges. These organizations have made a concious decision to be leaders instead of followers.
Regards….Andy
Costar is the one major organization missing from your list of members. They also have a huge vested interest (and investment) that would be jeapordized by the sharing of the technology you are suggesting is near at hand. They are just now reaching the point of dictating their own terms to the commercial realty businesses that depend on their services. In fact, their cost structure for a service that nearly all major commercial brokers depend on as a necessity, has gotten so high that it has surpassed rent as the highest single cost of a brokerage office. I hope you and your members are right and costar is in for a rude awakening.
Mark,
Thanks for your comments. There’s no doubt that OSCRE Standards will enable industry professionals to exchange, process, analyze, re-use and re-purpose information much more effectively than ever before and as you state, will most likely level the playing field by making it more competitive and presumably, lowering the cost of data for all.
At the same time, CoStar might also consider using the same standards to streamline data being received from their upstream data sources as well as provide greater value to their downstream customers who wish to access and import CoStar data without the need for manual data entry or data scrubbing, provided the downstream data recipient also had the free OSCRExml Standard in place.
I must qualify that I have no detailed knowledge how CoStar acquires bulk upstream data, makes information available to their (downstream) customers or their level of efficiency.
Additionally, CoStar and LoopNet have both been ivited on several occasions to participate in the development of OSCRE’s Commercial Information Exchange (CIE) Standard. Both declined.
one company that was singled out for mention at RealCOMM was Riisnet (http://www.riisnet.com). in terms of developing the vision of an collaborative workspace for commercial/institutional real estate transactions, i suggest that they have built it.
RIISnet (Argus Transaction Zone powered by RIISnet) should very well be the future of real estate transactions, and the birth of a market based exchange for our industry based on OSCRE standards. It is a new initiative to connect global asset management functions with global transactions and will link capital market participants through exchange functionality.
For those of us who believe in innovation and the need for innovation in our industry, RIISnet is the first Company to finally connect the acquisition plans of buyers and disposition plans of sellers through the click of a mouse. It is driven by product offerings and acquisition needs and provides immediate synchronous access to participants in the transaction as well as key information and service providers.
The Argus Zone/ RIISnet exchange will provide better, more comprehensive information for real estate leaders to make buy and sell decisions, and it will occur most readily through the use of OSCRE standards. The power of OSCRE and the efficiency of an industry-wide adopted exchange may be the break through the marketplace is looking for.