Transparency

At last year's Connect conference in SF, we made "transparency" the theme of the conference. [This year's is "Open source, Open data and Open dialogue"]. Transparency improves real estate markets. More information = better informed parties = getting to terms quicker = more transactions.
Those who hold back information hurt the market. Data coming out of the closet is the first step towards the transparent world -- let's call that quantatative transparency.
Next is qualitative transparency. An army of real estate bloggers is exploding onto the scene -- scrutinizing the data, the claims and the information and at some point each other. For the longest time, we felt alone blogging about real estate, not any longer. Now, the power of the [real estate] crowd has been released and the consequences are far reaching.
We expect the real estate blogging community to become the police force that weeds out unscrupulous agents and bad practices -- something that the government and associations have failed at over the years.
Transparency forces us all to accept feedback. We learned that at the InmanWiki this past week, when we began publishing RSS feeds of blogs. The blogging community began a great discussion on the pros and cons of aggregated RSS fees and the different ways blogs should consider having their RSS fees displayed. The bloggers have also prompted us to re-think the firewall we put on our news archives. [Bring down the wall Mr. Inman!].
Glen Kelman of Redfin faces the bloggers this week, after he released data on his consumer value proposition.
One thing is certain: the crowd can seem brutal but eventually the truth will prevail.

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