2002-01-19
Real Estate Informatics
© Tilk László Géza Preface
Nowadays information is
one of the most marketable goods. Electronic informational systems have being
developed for just only the last 23-30 years in the world. At Hungary this
process has been speed up since 1989 and many informatic systems has appeared
at many sectors of the economy. One of these sectors is the real estate
sector. Real estate is a gathered name for goods that can not be moved
from their places (real estates are agricultural lands, building sites,
houses, flats, buildings, etc.). The Hungarian real
estate market (REM)- at its advanced state - can be divided into civil
and business REM. Civil REM consists of the market of local residents
and small firms while business REM focuses on the sale of real estates on
purpose of production and services. While the prices of goods and services
appearing on civil REM are between 100 thousand and 100 million HUF the
business REM's price zone is between 10 million and 1-2 billion HUF. While the number of civil REM's offers
is between 300 - 500 thousand for an examined period the number of business
REM's offers does not reach the number of 10 thousand. From other line the two sides of
real-estate markets can be described as the civil REM mainly focuses on
living sites, Family-houses, flats and non living real estates, and the
business REM deals with market of non living real-estates such as
agricultural lands, building sites, and non living real-estates with houses
on it. For today at Hungary - due to the
change of regime in 1989 - both of these real-estate markets can be
considered as real markets. The civil REM in its complex entirety is clearly
arranged and well-balanced in correlation of supply and demand, but the
business REM is hectic and speculative. The real-estate speculation's main
field is the business REM. The aim and purpose of real estate informatics
The function of real estate
informatics is to forward information about real estates (goods, services)
from the offerer (selling, letting servicing) through various channels to the
users. The real estate market is a special market
that simply can not be condensed into a smaller area like a grocery market
but a real estate informatic system can do this condensing virtually. The main elements of real estate
informatics are: q
information
production q
information
turning q
information
supplying The base of information production
is monitoring which means a permanent and selective media watch. The raw
material of information production mainly consists of the offers (selling,
letting) announced in a form adds. The offers for real-estate selling and
letting are mostly announced at advertising papers according to this these
adds can be considered as the starting point of the real estate informatics'
activity. From data carriers the information is fed into a computer, the
offers with their typical parameters get into a real-estate data bank. A
real-estate offer with its characteristic parameters is called record. A
real-estate data bank is described with its active and archiv record number.
The active record is not older and the archive is older then a month. The information turning is
managed through electronic device-systems and it is based on computing
technique. Data transfer can be done through
wires (telephone, ISDN) or through wireless systems (TDC - Tele Data Cast). The possibilities of information
supplying always depend on the variety of the available technical
devices. So information supplying can be managed q
in
words, on telephone ( audiotext ) q
in
written form of list printed into a
PC or TV screen (
teletext, interactive teletext, BBs ) q
in
written form of list printed into fax ( faxbank, audio fax ) q
in
electronic form (floppy-disk, CD , Internet) Audiotext-service is managed by
telephone. The client calls a phone number (with higher price rate - to pay
for the service) and he/she tells him/her demands on a requested sort of real
estate (what? where? for what price?) and an operator gives him/her
information from the database. Audiofax service is based on fax device. The
client calls, asks and gets a fax. On Internet the information is
supplied at two ways. First is supplying data for subscribers where Internet
is the data mediator and the other is showing the kind of information that
the data bank has using Internet as a shop-window. To sum it up the main aim of real
estate informatics is a to offer an up-to-date entire survey from offers for
concrete sort of real estates at a particular geographic area (street,
postcode, district, city, region). Fundamentals
As everything real estate offers also
have common forms for each sort of real estates. A civil real estate offer
describes the typical parameters between 300 - 500 characters, or a picture
and 200-300 characters describing the real estate. A real estate offer can be from the
minimum "Flat for rent Tel: 1234567" to a detailed tender with
200-300 pages. Complying with the requirements of
real estate informatics the minimal need of information about a real estate
is: q
guiding
price (P) q
location
(L) q
specification
(S) q
available
offerer (A) The offer must have a guiding price
(P), which is common on civil REM for selling is "1000HUF" and for
letting is in a dimension of "1000HUF/m2". On business REM the
"DM/m2, year" is not rare. The offer must point the location
(L) of the real estate, so the concrete description of geographic location
must have shown (city, area, and street). The offer must define the specification
(S) namely the particular function (building site, Family house, flat,
office, shop, etc.) and the size of the real estate. Basically the size of
real estates is mainly described in m2 but at flats it is common to show only
the number of rooms. According to the national law and
order a real estate offer can be announced by the owner or by the owner's
agent. The available offerer (A) is
necessary for fulfilling the real estate transaction. The most general form
is to show one or more phone numbers at the offer, that means a no-name
description of offerers. At some offers an address and a name is show because
of the lack of telephone. At real estate informatics connection
we use two other notions. q
active data
and data banks q
archive data
and data banks It is necessary to introduce the
active data notion to distinguish them from the actual data, from the offers
described by them The "actual" means
that the offer is available and in all probability the real estate
transaction (selling/buying, letting) can be established. The "active" database
contains the records, which were fixed into the real estate data bank not
later then 30 days older are the "archive" ones. These notions are important for
qualifying data on lists from the data bank. Qualifying is very important for
real estate data bank services namely for the aspect of information
servicing. When a list shows that all of the offers are "actual"
the user can be misled and this would be followed by complaint. In case of a real estate information
list or data it is not 100% guaranteed that all of them are active. This is
due to the fact that the real estate market is always changing and working
daily and hourly, so many transactions are established in every minute and
many offers are expired. Considering that real estates are free price goods
the offrerers in most case are waiting for more inquirers so the deal takes
time. Observations show that the transaction of a trade-able real estate can
take 1- 4 weeks, while in case of a less trade-able real estate this period
can be a round a year. It is a rule at real estate market that the offers
with lower price are sold quicker than the offers with higher prices. A 100%
actual list only can be given by the owner or by its agent (real estate
agent, lawyer, etc.). These lists are only 100% actual in
case of direct controlling the offers before distributing because the owners
(who have charged the agents) do not give exclusive charge they entrust other
agents and lawyers with the deal of the transaction. The main feature of real
estate lists is the actuality of offers from active lists connected with the
date of announcing. This means that those offers at each lists are the more
actual where the dates of announcing are closer to the date of the list's
making. So a real estate information list can
be qualified with the announcing dates of offers from the respect of actual
probability. For example when a real estate list
has 100 offers for the last 30 days the probability of actuality is
decreasing at the end of the list. On the first day before this list was made
the offers are current in 80-95% probability but on the 30th day
the actuality is less then 30-45%. Other example is that the 80-90% of
one-room-flats at Budapest are sold after 14 days from their announcement. Real estate information
lists have the advantage that nowadays they are the only data carriers that
can show the widest prospect, so they can give the widest variety regarding
periods and types of real estates. This also means they the knowledge of
these lists is necessary for a true real estate market information. An other typical feature
of real estate data banks that the offers are fed into a computer one-by-one
each of them means a separate offer independently of whether it was fixed
once or not. This obviously means that the base banks of some real estate
data banks have 2,5 - 3,2 times more data than it is in reality. This
multiplying effect is due to the advertising practice. The offreres are
setting up not just one but more advertisements in more advertising papers
and for longer period. Since data is fed into computers thanks to the
calculating technique filtering can be managed as well. There are two types of real estate
informatic data stores: q
repeated q
filtered While at the repeated data stores the
offers are fixed at each time they appear on data carriers and each get into
records the filtered data stores only have the offers with their latest
appearing dates. The widest real estate market survey
is available from a filtered real estate data store for a concrete area and
for a concrete sort of real estates. Filtering has 95% efficiency since it
was made by a computer-program. In so far as some times the offerers change
the text of adds advertising the same real estate and this can cause repeated
records that wasn't dropped at filtering. Recognising this kind of duplicated
records is very easy during data inquire. Technical part - Monitoring
The monitoring means a permanent and
selective media watch. The selective part of this means that there are a few
top advertising papers (data carriers) containing a great mass of adds and
the parameters that all the fixed offers must show namely the specification,
location and price (what? where? at what price?). Fixing is completed by a
special computer-program. It was developed from 1992 to 1997 called
"IPI-PLUS". With a view to create a system to make the data fixing
as quick and safe as possible from data carriers (mainly from adds) and to be
able for an office to keep a record of their own real estate offers as well.
The program is able to process offers for demand and real estate changes but
it is not included at the monitoring. The real estate informatic data fixing
can be learned in a professional course or also at home by oneself with the
help of Users' manual and Data fixing description. The software runs under
DOS operating system with the minimal requires of IBM PC AT 386. The data
fixing can be done at home. Data Bases
Real estate informatic qualifies the
offers with time qualification. This means that the active data bases only
has records not older 30 days. This needs daily data fixing, transferring (or
loading) and making union. The union making is the special
process when each records are fed into the database and the data bank is
being filtered and updated. The
database's primary data inquirer software is the program called "PROMT
IPI", witch is prepared for prompt data inquire. The IPI-PLUS software's is also able
for a compact data inquire so a complex real estate market analysis can be
done with the help of this. All of the real estate informatic data bank's
fields can be inquired using mathematical logic relations. It is supposed to
know the base math logic elements for using this kind of data inquire. Monitoring was started in 1992;
permanent monitoring for concrete districts of Budapest has been existing
since 1995. With a same system nowadays works an
informatic data base for vehicles and in the future would be enlarged for
accommodations and for jobs. In conclusion a real estate informatic
data bank is a system of the 21st century. In an "information-society"
that is being developed in this century informatic systems are getting more
and more demanded. The information is collected into the most compact form
and the system is able to provide data for many users. Example for complete study
As an
example a complex analyse of flat prices of Budapest was made with the help
of a Hungarian real estate informatic data bank called "TERINFO DATA
BANK" for the period of
2nd quarter of 1998 and 1st half of 1999. There
are five studied price zones for the examined real estate namely for flats.
Prices are in the dimension of 1000HUF on the vertical axis, and on
border of the diagram the months are shown.
Sources:
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