Finding opportunity in real estate’s ‘big data’

Editor's note: This column is the second part in a recurring series highlighting issues surrounding data and the real estate industry. Tech and real estate industry strategists Gahlord Dewald and Rob Hahn will host the first-ever Inman Data Summit, scheduled July 25-26 in San Francisco. The summit precedes the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. Last week I discussed three different kinds of data that are important to the real estate industry: property data, customer behavior data and market data. This week I want to talk about size of data. Geeks refer to this as scale -- as in, “Will that scale?” Put another way, can that idea survive if it gets much, much bigger? Or will it crush the organization to maintain it when it gets much, much bigger? One of the fun topics of discussion among tech and marketing wonks of late is the idea of “big data.” Big data is any data set that is too large to easily manipulate from your desktop computer. It is big dat...