When a Real-Estate Platform Becomes an Urban Actor

Idealista has been developing its business in offering the classic online real estate ads platform. The massive amount of information they have been accumulating over the years is transforming them into an urban actor, offering their analysis of the evolution of the real estate market back to the public as well as trends almost in real-time (e.g. el precio de la vivienda usada en españa ya está en niveles de 2005); the kind of report that would take longer to produce through traditional processes. Not only do the analyze the market from the offers (online ads) but they could also evaluate the demand in certain areas of a city from logs on their web server. All this accessible back to the public through their open API.

Now, Idealista offers a call-free number for housing seekers to report any “for rent” or “on sale” sign on the street. If the real estate object is in their database, they will provide all the descriptions and possibly offer the kind of comparative service (i.e. comparing the price with the market) they offer online.

Why do I blog this: Some food for thought for our upcoming workshop ‘Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane‘: An online service, accumulating data on a city transforming into an urban actor, now using crowdsourcing techniques to expend is coverage. Curious to see how this evolves.