When it comes to sexy technology topics, “data standards” ends up pretty far down the list. But the things that make for good article headlines and sell conference tickets are not always where the real pain points lie for the actual practitioners in the property industry. We were a bit stunned when the essay that we published about data accessibility was one of the most popular of our entire Propmodo Metatrends 2019 campaign. Part of this was due to the fact that that article is incredibly well written and insightful (shout out to the author Candyce Edelen for the great work she put into it). But the other part is that getting access to data, in a form that is easily usable, is one of the biggest problems that every property shop faces on a daily basis.
As we dove deeper into this topic (including this article about understanding data conditions, this podcast talking with founders of companies compiling real estate data and this panel about the forces that are holding back an open data ecosystem) one topic kept coming up: what will be the organization that decides the data standards? We decided to get the heads of some of the organizations doing just that, Jeremy Crawford from RESO the residential real estate standards organization and Lisa Stanely from OSCRE, which is doing something similar on the commercial side. In order to get an idea of how these standards actually impact the way data real estate technology is evolving we also asked Josh Fraser of Estated, a company creating property data APIs to give his opinion.
We hope you enjoy listening and please let us know if you have any followup questions for the guests.