Statistics and standards

Smith believes in feeding more information to these current platforms. “We need to see further integrating of other types of data prospective home buyers will look for,” he says. “The layering of other characteristics such as transit access, walkability, public safety and education is something we’ll see. Some listing sites will have those individual components, and they’re finding ways to increasingly connect those types of data.”

Jensen also hopes to see uniform standards that simplify how data is presented. She has served on the board of directors for the Real Estate Standards Organization, which is working to establish such standards nationwide.

“What you’re seeing today is self-reporting,” Jensen says. “It’s really hard to have objective statistics when you’re not comparing apples to apples. I’ve seen statistics packages that can vary from report to report: They use the same algorithm, but one pulls the data on the 5th of the month and the other on the 20th of the month.”

Numbers, of course, can change even in that short a time span. For consistency’s sake, “you have to set the rules of the game,” she notes. “The industry as a whole needs to come together on these objective standards that we all play by—so that when we talk about data, it’s not a ‘he said, she said’ scenario. It’s as factual as you can get.”

No matter how such standards play out, or how much and how fast data storehouses gain in detail and depth, there can be no doubt: For the real estate industry, data is big and getting bigger.