Quicker Transaction Cycles Wanted... As Hurricane Francis recently bore down on Florida's Atlantic Coast, Wal-Mart rushed trucks filled with beer ("the pre-hurricane top seller"), flashlights and strawberry Pop-Tarts ("seven times normal sales") down Interstate 95 just ahead of the storm's landfall.

That's a great example of "predictive technology," according to Wal-Mart's CIO, Linda Dillman. With 100 million customers walking into Wal-Mart stores every week, the company can mine a huge amount of sales data on customer behavior -- including run-ups to previous hurricanes. (New York Times, Nov 14, 2004)

So it got me thinking. Could brokers use "predictive technology" to shorten the real estate transaction cycle -- like selling a property or signing a lease quicker?

OK, it's a crazy idea. Real estate transactions are too different from each other. Knowledge about them is fragmented among thousands of competing agents. And there are very few incentives to collectively share knowledge.

But what about large information providers like CoStar and LoopNet, which aggregate data on billions of dollars of real estate transactions every year?

Wouldn't it be fascinating to know how many searches brokers were running in a city for, say, 10,000 square feet of space? Could you correlate the number of searches with future rental trends?

Likewise, wouldn't it be interesting to know how many searches were conducted for $2 million investment properties in a particular market? Could you correlate the number of searches with future sales trends?

Hey, maybe that's the kind of "predictive" information that brokers and owners would even pay for. What do you think?

Spread the Word... Many thanks to this week's sponsor, RealCapitalMarkets, which offers it own tool to shorten the sales cycle. If you would like to tell Dispatch readers about your services, send e-mail or call 415-461-4703.

--Peter Pike