In life, many people tend to look back on their mistakes and wished they had approached a situation differently. It’s always so much clearer when looking back, what a better choice might have been; as they say, hindsight is 20/20. Thankfully these “lessons learned” are not always as painful in programming as they can be in life. When it comes to programming, particularly when dealing with 3rd-party data, you have to learn to expect the unexpected. If you happen to miss something, well… just roll it into version 2.0.

We quietly released version 2.0 of our listings system last week. The change was (hopefully) transparent to the everyday user. However, it will mean great things for us in the near future. After dealing with two separate sources (Toronto Real Estate Board - TREB and Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver - REBGV) in version 1.0 of our listing system, we quickly realized that we were going to have to revamp things down the line. Each board can have a very different way of displaying data. For example, for a building’s age, TREB uses year ranges “15-30 years” whereas REBGV uses a single integer “15 years”.

With the number of boards there are across Canada, we were bound to run into more of these unique situations. Time for version 2.0 to compensate for these types of situations. I am happy to say we now have a system that not only is more consistent but also more flexible.

Our listings system revamp has provided us with:

• Data Abstraction
  - In addition to common data among all boards we also have another layer of abstraction. This layer allows for customized fields per real estate board so we can have virtually any data type and can easily accommodate for it.
• Listing Redundancy
  - We will have better control over every REALTOR®’s and Office’s listings.
  - Because we deal with several 3rd party data sources, in the past our listings were not working as consistently as we would have liked.
  - Now, generally if there is a problem we can just “flip a switch” to a different data source so we should always have something to show for listings.
• More consistent visual presentation of the listings
  - We revamped the template system to use common templates throughout all sections of the site which display listings.
  - However, if needed, we have allowed for separate CSS (style) files and images per page allowing for some flexibility.

Now that we have an improved and more consistent platform for our listings we have starting contacting many of the boards across Canada to obtain 3rd party data agreements. Before long, you’ll be able to see our advanced listings in your area and virtually every area Sutton has an office. At that point, we’ll have the most complete and most advanced listing aggregation system in Canada.

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I was forwarded this commercial made by the Peer1 crew in New York:

I thought it was pretty funny because I used to live in an apartment that didn’t look so different from the one above. We were three (sometimes six) young Internet professionals living in a 1000sq/ft apartment where the computers often outnumbered the residents. If you give twenty-somethings an unmetered 10Mbit fiber line into their apartment you’re going to have server creep.

Anyways, I (and Joel) am very fond of Peer1’s service. We’ve had our cage in their Vancouver data center for almost as long as they’ve had a Vancouver data center. Their service has always been exceptional and in the past 4 years we’ve only had one outage and that only lasted for about 15 minutes. They have a 24 hour data center, we can go there anytime we want, excellent security and things just work. Their network is one part of our services that I never have to worry about.

When they started out they were co-location only. A couple of years ago they added managed services which takes care of all technical bits for you so you only have to worry about running your business. If you’re looking for server hosting or a new home for your servers give Delynn O’ Sullivan a call and tell them Benson from Sutton sent you. They’ll take care of you.

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NAR’s technology arm the CRT (Center for REALTOR® Technology) recently released an open source single sign on toolkit. What is SSO and why is it important?

SSO allows a user to log in once and be access to multiple applications. This is much better than having to remember multiple usernames and passwords. A SSO system makes thing more convenient.

This news will likely garner more blank stares than “oohhs” and “ahhs” from the average agent. However, developers should pay attention.  The CRT releasing a SSO tool kit sends a message that online tools need to begin working together.

I’m particularly interested in this because at Sutton we’ve been working on our own identity management initiatives. We’ve been looking at the light weight OpenID to integrate into FlexiSites. That’ll gives our agents the ability to use their FlexiSites as an OpenID enabled URI.

What this will accomplish is the first step towards online identity management and online marketing for our agents. That’s thinking Real Estate 2.0.

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