Data is "lighter these days" so load it up on your real estate website

While there is always the usual amount of bad news going around, there was one major bit of great news recently that few people seemed to notice.

And this bit of news has implications for anybody who owns a website.

IBM just announced the launch of their Sequoia BlueGene Q supercomputer and its stature as the fastest computer in the world.

It can run at 16.32 petaflops.

Wow you might say. The only flops I know are the ones I wear on my feet.

Here’s one way to put it into perspective – the machine can calculate in one hour what it would take 6.7 billion people 320 years to do with calculators.

The story behind the story here is that computer processing power is just getting darn crazy fast. They are saying these computers can probably be used to predict earthquakes, something that previously was unpredictable.

In terms of real estate, what this indicates is that it is getting easier and easier to process lots and lots of data.

Take your website for example. What do you have on it? Some homes for sale?

Why not put a database with every home in your neighborhood for sale? And the neighboring county as well. Heck, why not put the whole country for comparison purposes. Throw in information about existing homes.

How about adding every business in your neighborhood to your site? Every school. Hospital. Park. Golf course. Restaurant.

How about adding descriptions of those schools for example – class size, student/teacher ratios?

How about adding boundaries for counties, school districts, municipalities?

Whoa you might say, I can’t afford to buy one of those Sequoia machines right now. (You wouldn’t want to anyway. They’re water cooled and who has time to add coolant to their computer every day.)

SpatialMatch is a technology that you can add to your site for all of the data mentioned above. It’s an IDX and Lifestyle Search Engine that processes an enormous database of real estate data and presents it in a user-friendly map format all embedded on your site.

And it does this at a very low cost.

Take a look at what’s going on around you. You can now get Netflix movies streamed to your computer. You can watch TV on your phone.

Data is basically getting, for lack of a better word, lighter.

So don’t just use the same format on your website you’ve been using for the past 10 years. Load up data on your site. It can handle it.

A major aspect of your job as a real estate professional is to provide information to buyers.

So, one way to look at it is he or she who has the most information wins. (Or at least has the edge).

You don’t need to fill your garage with 6-foot tall mega-processing behemoths, but be sure to take advantage of today’s technology and fill your site with the right stuff.

Here’s a link to info about IBM’s accomplishment.

Here’s a link on how you can add an incredible amount of hyper-local real estate data to your website.