06-03-22 Tech in Real Estate News | Web Scraping

This week's topics we will discuss real estate, web scraping and legal triumphs that it's recently had, how labor shortages are pushing for tech disruption in new development, and a case study to identify emerging markets using permit data.

Ariel Herrera 00:00

Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's episode, let's hack in real estate news podcast, where we get to dive deep on recent trends within real estate and technology. This week's topics we're going to discuss real estate, web scraping and legal triumphs that it's recently had, how labor shortages are pushing for tech disruption in new development, and a case study to identify emerging markets using permit data. My name is Ariel Herrera, the analytics area channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. If you haven't already, please join the tech and real estate Facebook group where I'm posting all the latest news content as I see it, and we're discussing as a group trends and analytics. Alright, let's get started. The first article comes from one of our members of the tech and real estate Facebook group. And it's from TechCrunch. And the state's Web Scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms. And before I dive into what that means, as an overview and real estate, Web Scraping is used very often, what web scraping does that it takes elements from a web page. And it allows you to extract that data and input it so you can easily consume it say in like a Excel CSV file. For example, say if we wanted to get all for sale properties that are listed on Zillow, we would have to go to zillow.com. And manually go to inside each of the properties that are for sale and grab information like beds, bathrooms, square foot, and more. However, with web scraping, we could actually automate that whole process is only a few lines of code in a language like Python. If you've been following for a period of time, you know that we could even take it a step further by getting this data straight from API's. Now, the problem that we've consistently faced with Web Scraping is we have websites blocking the process. So every time we built up a script to auto extract this data, a website then puts a blocker and this code needs to be rewritten. There's also a lot of legality in these websites stating, hey, you're taking information from our website, it's not allowed, and we're going to sue you for it. However, in this case, the US appeals court ruled that scraping publicly accessible data is not in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. They stated when a computer or websites gates are up, and therefore information is publicly accessible, no authorization is required. So this is helpful for people like us who are consuming that data, whether it's getting for sale properties on Zillow, or it's getting tax liens from our county website. If the US Supreme Court is on our side that this data is already available, web scraping should be fine. Now I don't condone bots that are just overloading traffic. For example, if you built some sort of bot to paying Zillow 1000 times a second, that could potentially crash their system, and especially for a county website, it could bring everything down, leading to people not being able to get in regularly just to make a tax payment. So if you are involved in creating any web scraping tools, just be mindful to have best practices around it. The next article comes from TechCrunch as well, and it states investors discuss labor shortage is taking up the construction tech stack. So after the pandemic, there was a large labor shortage. A lot of those contact workers were not able to be on site to visualize what was going on in the construction. And without that visibility, it was difficult to really assess what risks were occurring. And if they were able to deliver their projects on time. This pain point alongside rising costs of raw materials, led the industry of construction to scramble for solutions to bridge these gaps. And this is where software companies came in. In order to implement data collection, automation and data analysis in the current space of the construction industry. The construction industry really took a hard look to understand what are ways that they can use to automate new home construction as well. Can they use 3d printing?

Ariel Herrera 04:29

Can they use robotics? In some sense? Are there ways that they could use robotics for example, to fill the massive labor shortage and drive down construction cycles, one of the leading partners and speed invest, which is a company that focuses on technology in the construction industry stated government's not only in the US, but also in Germany will play a huge role. There is a massive backlog in infrastructure investments that now need to be pushed forward to trigger are massive investments. This is a clear tendency to make building information modelling for public construction projects. And there will be continued and growing pressure from governments to measure and minimize environmental impact and carbon footprint going forward, be it with recycling quotas or carbon emissions targets. New Tech will help solve many ways, I find this super, super interesting. Not only is this for particular market in the US, but all the US and across the world as well. We're looking for solutions to be able to develop new construction at a low cost and fast and data and robotics go hand in hand in order to create that solution. What comes to mind immediately for me is the housing shortage. There's not enough houses being constructed for demand in the US, there's been a lot of discussion that counties are going to allow accessory dwelling units, also known as ad use to be placed on site on residential property. For example, if you were to convert your single family home and take the basement or the garage and make it into a rental legally by your county, you may not be allowed to do that you also may not be allowed to make a standalone mother in law suite. However, if your county decides to expand these laws, this could really be a solution to the supply housing crisis that we currently face. And imagine the future if we're able to build ad use on our property for very low costs. And very quickly, I think it's definitely in scope. And I'm going to keep my eyes on the space. The last article that I read was on the medium by Jordan being called the densifying hotspot real estate areas with analytics. I found this analysis to be very interesting and original Jordan being as a data scientist, he did an independent study to look into his own market Raleigh, North Carolina, Raleigh has had expansive amount of growth in such a short period of time. Jordan's mind frame was okay, I'm going to fast growing city, the median property values are skyrocketing. Where are developers going to go next, as we know, really hot markets, usually the suburb towns around them, or just towns that are close by easy to access start to get populated as well, as workers have in the cities decide to move out with their families and look for more affordable living. So what Jordan did is that he wants to get data from city permit as well as census block data. And he overlaid his information of permitting on his map of Raleigh city by looking at data over a 10 year timeframe, he was able to map out millions of dollars being poured into new construction through permits and identify what would be the next area close to Raleigh, North Carolina that would have more development and likely be in an emerging market. Ultimately, he noticed that activity was moving towards south and Raleigh after a decade as downtown ran out of development opportunity. I'm very happy to say we're going to have Jordan being as a special guests on the podcast to get a more in depth analysis. As I believe we can learn a lot more from this approach. This can help us to remain within our market, even if it's starting to get very hot, but to understand what coming trends and new hotspots will emerge. So what's coming up next for the analytics area channel. I've spoke a little bit about this before, but I'm making a push to get into wholesaling. And in this I want to have my business as automated as possible not to eliminate the people aspect. But since I do still work a full time job, I need to make this with as little amount of manual intervention as possible. So I've explored several different CRMs, including Podio, and HubSpot, and as well as Zoho so far, I think so

Ariel Herrera 09:01

who is going to be my main CRM, just because I'm able to add functions and web hooks and use a programming language called dilute which is not too hard to pick up. So in this, I plan to have some more videos around. If you're using Zoho as a CRM, whether it's for wholesaling or for your own investment business, how to automatically get property data. So say if you had just a list of addresses, maybe you pull this from list source, it's a list of those who are behind in their tax payments. I want the availability that you're able to push this into a CRM automatically get property data like Zestimate rents estimate calculate cash flow, zoning, lot size and more. Once this hits, I want to automatically skip trace these properties to get the owners and their phone numbers as well as emails and then once you have the property owner send an SMS text so definitely check out those videos I'll be posting them on YouTube as well as having how to blogs on the medium to follow and for the weekend plans super excited my cousin is here to visit from New York. So we'll be spending some time in the sun as a group. And it'll be my last weekend in Florida for a bit of time as I'm going up to New Jersey to visit some family pretty soon. I hope you have a great weekend. And if you haven't already, please join the Facebook group called Tech and real estate to get the latest news and join in our discussion. Thanks so much. And see you next week.