How you could improve the experience of looking for a home with more open data

In the last decade, the number of data-based services, open or proprietary, that we have at our disposal has grown in a way that few could have imagined. Maps and satellite photos from almost any corner of the planet, photographs of our streets, weather station data or traffic or public transport data are present in our day to day, usually on our smartphone.

However, we continue making many of our decisions with a dose of subjectivity that is not appropriate to the information and digitalization era in which we live. And undoubtedly, open data can contribute even more to reducing this dose of uncertainty in our decisions.

Decisions related to public transport are a good example of how open data can help us to choose the best when we leave our home to go to work or to choose a transport combination suitable to traffic congestion in every moment. However, these small wrong decisions that we make every day do not usually have great consequences, beyond we can arrive late to work, we miss an appointment in our destination or we devote more energy than necessary. If we are lucky we just discover by chance or because someone tells us, what is the trick to improve our choices on a certain path.

In any case, there are other areas of our lives in which unfortunately a wrong decision due to lack of data to support our decisions can have consequences of greater impact. Let's look at the case of searching for a home, which is a time that we do several times throughout life.

As professionals in the sector say, location, location and location are the three most important issues that must be taken into account when choosing a home. The location is an element that link issues as diverse as the distance to our points of interest (workplace, schools, hospitals or access to the public transport network), neighborhood security, air quality, neighborhood demographics, noise level and even energy consumption. Whether we change location or just neighborhood, having as much information as possible about a location we are considering moving is essential to make a good choice. These are just some examples of questions that we usually ask and that can or could be answered with services based on open data and that are common in other countries, either through free services, or payment:

• From which locations can I access to point X (for example, our work center) in less than 40 minutes? / What was the last transactions related to a certain property and what hawas its economic value? And other properties in the area?

• What broadband services and other types of supplies are available in one location?

• What locations in my city are less than 1 km far away from a school with the highest score in the administration ranking? / What is the demographic distribution (average age, average income, etc.) of a certain area?

• What is the level of noise or environmental pollution of a given street? / What kind of public facilities are available near a house?

Traditionally we have answered these types of questions in a partial and unstructured way, based on the often informal and subjective information that we obtain from unreliable sources.

Despite the amount of time we spend finding the place where we are going to reside, we often discover many things that we do not like that are important to us and our quality of life. Basically we all have different priorities and some, as we have seen, could be solved thanks to open data that is already available in some countries and could be in Spain as well.

If we review leading real estate portals in the United States such as Zillow or in the United Kingdom as Zoopla, it is easy to see differences with the most used Spanish portals in terms of the information related to location that they provide for each property. And it is not difficult to establish a relationship between this difference and the availability of open data in the areas we have described.

Even in these countries, there is a wide margin for improvement to provide better information. This is covered, in part, by services such as Neighbourhood Scout in the United States, or CheckMyStreet or PropertyDetective in the United Kingdom. These services are largely based on the added value that these companies or projects bring to open data on demography, pollution or security, or data from the property registry itself.

In short, as citizens, we make much uninformed decisions that can sometimes have great consequences. Some of these decisions could be substantially improved with a greater availability of open data in areas where these data are being collected anyway by different administrations in the exercise of their functions.

Content prepared by Jose Luis Marín, Head of Corporate Technology Startegy en MADISON MK and Euroalert CEO.

Contents and points of view expressed in this publication are the exclusive responsibility of its author.