Guest Post: Enterprise solutions quietly slip into real estate

Real estate as an industry has never embraced enterprise class technology platforms. The reasons are obvious - the industry evolved from a national patchwork of local brokerages serviced by local title and settlement providers, all running on mom-and-pop systems. During the "enterprise system 1990s," corporations started to consolidate their disparate operations and systems into the holy grail of a unified platform. But the real estate industry seemed to care less if title data and other documents could even be e-mailed, I remember waiting for my prelim title report sent by snail mail during a 2003 refi. Here's a list of real estate clients using BEA's enterprise solutions - no big names - a perusal of real estate customers at big enterprise system firms like SAP yield a similarly puny customer base.

Generally speaking, every title insurance company settlement platform, MLS system and brokerage system seems to have been developed internally and they don't communicate with each other well. The RETS initiative is a good example of how difficult it is just to get MLS systems to standardize the data fields they use to describe property information.

Real estate is now awakening to the fact that Internet technology is becoming the catch-all solution for marketing, lead generation, processing and aftercare. This opens up the opportunity to get brokerages and lenders to adopt enterprise solutions from technology providers instead of coding everything themselves. The most logical players to take advantage of this trend are the title companies that already provide settlement service platforms. Newer companies like SecondSpace are now implementing their search engine solutions to real estate companies like Florida's St. Joe that will essentially run their online presence.

This trend to providing backbone enterprise solutions is a different business model than selling systems components to the brokerages (example: Leadqual sells a lead qualification system that enhances only a segment of the brokerage's business) or providing APIs to brokerages to custom build new applications. Today at Transparent, I look at one company, Cyberhomes, a subsidiary of Fidelity Title's FNRES, that is quietly building a backbone solution that can potentially manage all the bells and whistles of a brokerage Web site.

--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate

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