"4 tips for real estate software developers" hits the mark.
I think it's safe to say that my regular readers—both of them—know and care far more about technology than I do. Not that I dislike technology, but it's not my passion. It's a tool, a very cool tool I quickly take for granted until it misfires. Which it does surprisingly often, because it's not like the software I use—and almost always it's software that fails me—was designed to put men on the moon. No, it's designed to perform relatively simple tasks. Or at least it should be, although I sense a belief among real estate software developers that if they don't push technology's envelope they don't deserve their cubicles. But that's precisely what I and the vast majority of agents don't want them to do. KISS should be stamped on the forehead of every developer who writes code for that curious (but only in the sense that he or she has little tolerance for "interesting quirks") animal, the real estate agent.
Which is why the article "4 tips for real estate software developers", posted on Inman News May 10 by tech consultant Gahlord Dewald, hit the spot for me.
First, he explained why real estate attracts so much developer attention: "lots of potential customers and a market that can scale". And here I thought they just liked us.
In case you're thinking of going after those scalable multitudes, or any scalable multitudes, here's Dewald's advice to developers.
1. "Don't shortchange your user interface." Dewald doesn't share the general notion, bless his heart, that we're all a bunch of fumbling technophobes. No, instead "there are too many bits of software out there that are overly complicated to use, with lots of buttons and screens and so on". Complication that I've long suspected is due either to incompetence, or to a need to show off to peers or to the highly impressionable, or all three. Complication doesn't sit well with the average successful agent who, as Dewald rightly says, has "an exceptionally limited amount of time", even if she has no life outside real estate. And the more successful she is, the less time she has "to read manuals or user group forums", the two favorite activities of the techie and no one else. I can vouch for this. A few days ago I had a printer problem that I might have solved by spending hours wading through HP's user forums. But maybe not, and I didn't have the time, or the patience, or much faith that what some other user posted would work for me. So I paid HP $39 to sort things out online, and happy to do it.
2. "Don't underestimate the policy challenges." This one may be peculiar to the real estate industry, but it does explain why so many listings websites have so much trouble keeping their information correct. "If you're building a solution to one of the most pervasive and core challenges in the industry today—property data—then be prepared to recognize that the problem is not primarily technical...Google, for example, gave up trying to maintain and display property listings. Let that be a warning". As I've said in postings about Zillow, Trulia and Yahoo, the easy part is assembling a vast database, then convincing users that a vast database has value by itself. The hard part is making that database make sense, as in Zillow's case, or making sure it's accurate and up-to-date, as in the case of the listing sites. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you're considering an IPO) 99.9 percent of online users wouldn't know accurate data from inaccurate, as long as it made them feel empowered.
3. "Avoid customization." The idea here is to avoid writing more lines of code every time some agent requests a new feature, because usually it simply adds complexity without meeting a widespread need. "The temptation to fork your code for particularly large clients will be great—leading you to increase your code maintenance costs." And also irritating the vast majority of users. I've long suspected that the reason I'm saddled with an MLS program that probably could put a man on the moon, yet never fails to irritate me at least once per session, is that some brokerage honcho demanded a "state-of-the-art" package that does all things for all agents—and rarely does any one thing as well as most agents think it should.
4. "Don't forget the onramp." Dewald sees the newbie agent as "the biggest opportunity for tech developers", because she hasn't gotten comfortable with any one program, hasn't developed strong preferences for doing things a certain way. He's got a point. The real reason I hate the MLS program I use probably has less to do with its needless complexity and more with the fact that the program I learned on didn't do much but did what it did very well. Which left me with the permanent conviction, right or wrong, that any program that does more is just showing off. In other words, they've lost me for good.