2.2 Real Estate Agent

2.2.1 Introduction

Henry, a real estate agent is creating a file to describe a house for sale. His goal is to record all information on the house, to present it in its most attractive form, to personalize this presentation for both identified and anonymous potential clients , and finally to diffuse this information in the most appropriate manner.

Collecting information on the house is the first order of business, including a plan of the house, pictures, noise levels in the house, garden, swimming pool, history, maintenance, and conformance to norms. The agent also needs to describe the facilities outside the house, neighborhood safety, risks linked to environment (such as hurricanes, earthquakes, floods), access to facilities (such as highways, train stations and airports), and facilities such as supermarkets and schools .

We develop two scenarios (short-term and long- term ) in which our real estate agent uses three kinds of connections for accessing services and information required for the job.

2.2.2 The Present

To-do lists are prepared at the office, taking advantage of the Internet connection and the search engines to gather information on the home environment. Henry is in constant connection with the office using either a laptop, a PDA, or his cell phone. When he visits the home, all necessary information is recorded and a thumbnail image is sent to a Web site. Potential customers receive an SMS message describing the house. These messages can either be sent to a large base of customers or to a very targeted population, either automatically or handpicked by the real estate agent. More information about potential buyers can be downloaded on the fly while travelling. In addition, the real estate agent can place a key box on the door which sends information to the agency each time somebody visits the home, eliminating the need to go and check these key boxes twice a week as used to be done.

Today, preparation of to-do lists needs to be done at the office and downloaded to the personal agent. During the visit to the house, the personal agent is the primary repository for information and synchronization of data, wirelessly communicating among scanner, camera, and microphone. Communications are established automatically between appliances, and files can be transferred and referred across devices. To-do lists help increase efficiency in achieving goals. On the way to another appointment, the real estate agent needs to pass by a kiosk; the appliances connect to the services offered there and print a generic catalog of the house for sale.

When he reaches the house, the real estate agent connects to the local-facilities and can query for information. All appliances can connect to the local network to communicate among themselves and connect to the Web. Therefore, all pictures and information about the home are directly posted on the Web site and are accessible by the clients. Brochures can also be printed out. If there is no network connection at the home, the real estate agent can take advantage of local coverage during his lunch break to synchronize with the office support system and send e-mail to the interested clients.

All tasks are triggered manually, and the end- user needs to verify the result of the action. The real estate agent triggers most operations, the managed architecture provides a reliable network, ensures a quality of service, and allows billing. But, compared to the future, where things do it for us, it is still a lengthy process that requires a lot of time today. Providing a more automated service would enable Henry to increase the quality of service by adding more details to the descriptions or spend more time talking to the prospective clients, for example, for which he does not have enough time today.

2.2.3 The Future

Our real estate agent is in constant connection with the office through his smart device. General preparation work for the house listing is generated automatically based on generic profiles like soccer mom, teenager, or specific profiles of existing clients existing in the office database or on recent statistics. This enables him to show the house to the right clients. The mission preparation is done by a support team. Once the preparation is finished, a precise mission statement, a to-do list, and a software agent are sent to Henry while he drives to the home and downloaded to his smart device.

A guidance system is used to organize visits according to road traffic, other appointments, and opportunities (such as good commission quota or probability of selling the house soon). Five minutes prior to the visit, Henry's personal agent calls the homeowners or clients to reconfirm. While the real estate agent travels to the house, he delegates his agent to conduct research on the neighborhood, safety records, schools, and so forth from police, county, and geographic records.

During the visit to the house, the personal agent actively helps Henry carry out the mission; in particular, appliances communicate and interact automatically with those in the home to collect data from them. The camera asks for pictures of the kitchen and gives a description of the important items to capture for all the clients. These pictures are automatically labeled and stored and are ready to be used. The catalogs are automatically composed and are print ready. Video recordings of parties and events casting a good image of the house can be requested uploaded to the house's web site. In addition, the size of each room can be precisely measured and transmitted to the personal agent, which updates the plan of the house and annotates each room's picture. All of this information can be immediately broadcast to potential clients, who can call Henry instantly for additional details.

Meanwhile, Henry follows his to-do list and focuses on taking pictures and collecting information on the house not available elsewhere, or gathering information requested specifically by clients.

The ultimate combination of appliances would enable users to go further and create a virtual home that future clients can navigate and discover at their pace. Interested parties can download the tour or software agents may deliver short lists of houses according to their specific choices. These virtual homes can be tailored to potential client tastes, providing a cozy house to a retiree or a wild party scene for students. Ultimately, a client can create avatars for his family, including the dog and goldfish , to see how these avatars would adapt in the new home, for instance how and when they use the swimming pool (the family, not the pets). We could also imagine the house twenty years down the road, estimating the maintenance costs and the evolution of the family.

All links between tasks are automatically made for the end-user. All the appliances collaborate in such a way that the user does not need to know where the information is stored, which software is used, or which connections are employed. The end-user is in control of the end results only; the process is completely invisible.

2.2.4 Summary

Let us look again at the key features of this scenario and how they have been implemented. The me-centric infrastructure is built on a high-availability, broadband network connection that links Henry with the office. The reason for a high-speed network is the number of large pictures that need to be transferred back and forth. Unless a new algorithm becomes available that can pack images much better than JPEG without losing quality, the size of the images will be probably around 1 MB. So either a WLAN network or Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) network will be required to make this system work. Roaming does not play an important role here. Speed is more important, and typically you can have either roaming or broadband access. The WLAN network would have a base station in every house that would transmit the information via cable or DSL, for example, back to the office. A UMTS network would require a base station near the house that would transmit the information via satellite to the Internet backbone and from there to the office.

The mobile device that will be used is a combination: mobile phone, PDA, and digital camera. We are seeing the first generation of these devices being introduced into the market today. Nokia [7] , for example, introduced the Nokia 7650, with an integrated digital camera, which takes pictures that then can be sent via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) on a high-speed mobile connection. It also provides a photo album for storing pictures and an advanced user interface that runs downloadable personal applications via Java technology. To make it easier to use, it includes joystick navigation and a color display. Although the quality of the pictures is still very poor (the Nokia provides only 640x480 pixels), the bandwidth is not very high, and the PDA functionality is not very good yet, we can expect to see devices that will match our requirements soon.

[7] http://www.nokia.com/

One of the biggest challenges in this scenario is the services required to run the business. If you look at the ecosystem in Figure 2.3, you can see that many of them do not exist in an optimal way. A synchronization tool is required to make sure that all data between the office and the device is up to date. While the images are quite large, the synchronization tool needs to check the bandwidth first and update the data only when enough bandwidth is available.

Figure 2.3. Real Estate Ecosystem

graphics/02fig03.gif

This means that if only little bandwidth is available, it should only synchronize small files, such as text files, and copy the descriptions of the images. If there is an urgent need for a certain image, it would be possible at least to search for it and download it immediately. The device should provide extensive descriptions to the pictures. The real estate agent should speak while taking the pictures and the device should save the spoken words and convert them into text. The device should also note where the pictures have been taken and use the construction plans of the house to create a virtual environment for prospective buyers.

An intelligent agent could be used to collect information about all repair work in the house. While Henry walks through the house and makes comments about repairs that need to be done in order to increase the sale price, the intelligent agent could start searching for the best offers from house repair companies, providing Henry with some time and cost estimates immediately. Another intelligent agent could collect all the information about the house and create an advertisement for the local newspaper and the local radio/TV stations automatically. Another intelligent agent could start to look through the customer database to find people who may be interested in the house and make appointments with them, if interested. Henry would receive a list of appointments before he even leaves the house.

Obviously, to have all of the services described in this scenario would be expensive and may not be profitable to implement. While most of the scenarios in this chapter are realistic and affordable, we wanted to show you some other ideas that may currently seem otherwise . However, if you look back in history, there have been many technologies and ideas that were considered unrealistic and expensive but have still become commodities today. One of the questions that needs to be answered is what economic model will cause a proliferation of so many diverse services that somehow come to be effectively aggregated into easy-to-use, coherent me-centric customer solutions.



Radical Simplicity. Transforming Computers Into Me-centric Appliances
Radical Simplicity: Transforming Computers Into Me-centric Appliances (Hewlett-Packard Press Strategic Books)
ISBN: 0131002910
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 88

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