The essential difference between PropertyClubPro and competing firms is we are asking you to consider and then make a monumental leap to engage a new property listing paradigm. While I believe what many consider to be the traditional bulletin board variety of real estate listing functions where information is squirreled away in a database, these will shortly be legacy and then obsolete. Thus the purpose of our blog articles is to bring to an open minded audience a carefully crafted information set to wet your appetite and curiosity regarding the usefulness in achieving extra ordinary performance by your business operations from our Web 2.0 technology.

I had the privilege last week of attending a rather large corporate industrial operations meeting. The Keynote speaker was Dr. Steve Bedwell, a well known MD and expertise in neuro-science as it relates to the mind and perspective. I was very amused by the fact that much of what he was teaching us I unconsciously apply to my own professional endeavors. However, he was able to precisely explain the Perspective Power, something he has trademarked and fine tune it for my own thinking through his lecture. I did further comprehensive reading on his web site of his published articles on the topic.

While Dr. Bedwell was immensely entertaining in getting the key points across, I have come to realize that in order for you to trust enough to make that monumental leap to give me your business, you too must apply these principles of perspective power when considering PropertyClubPro. On his blog http://keynote-speaker.net/blog he defines “What Is Perspective Power?”

At this point I would ask you to go read his blog and if that peaks your interest some of his published articles are located at http://keynote-speaker.net/ppintro_article.htm . Thus, I would like to give you an example of how these techniques have impacted my professional experience throughout the years.

As an engineer and someone who has done many years of programming in many different languages, codified thought requires large amounts of thinking time toward innovative ways to solve problems. You can write a programming specification and go off and code it. And after you finish it you realize that you need to rewrite the program because you discovered through a different set of perspectives a more elegant and efficient means of writing the program for optimal execution. PropertyClubPro was the same way. A valiant effort went into the design, industry experts were consulted but in the end, the product was not any better or worse than similar applications already in use.

It was at this point I stepped back and tried to look at the problem from several perspectives. I was not so terribly worried about the success of the project as I was confronted with this challenge. I abstracted down to some generalities some of the things competitors were doing tit-for-tat in the marketplace but nothing stood out as extra-ordinary. In other words if I were their customer I could see paying no additional premium because the value-add in terms of services or products just was not there. And again unconsciously I drew upon my past experience and skills to build the 1st Property Bank which did not rely upon a relational database. Flexing my perspective power resulted in a PropertyClubPro product that is well ahead of the public bulletin board services as well as the in-house applications developed internally by the larger commercial real estate firms. In conclusion to these examples, I feel as a customer you will need to view our products and services in light of the various perspectives you will certainly have when reevaluating problems in your current operations before gaining the confidence in a decision to drop the old and go with the new PropertyClubPro.

In support of this article I must also note that in the spirit and application of Lean Six Sigma in constructing PropertyClubPro, we have strived to only build into the products and services those things that you are willing to pay for. In others words we have looked at other systems and have tried to eliminate the waste and superfluous functions that does not contribute to your bottom line. And what we feel is an achievement is we now have the combination and ability to both database the property listing in our traditional relational database and host it in a Property Bank. We can convert from relational to the unstructured bank model and with a Property Bank, exchange links are no longer necessary between your web site and a 3rd party. A small bonus to lower your web development and administrative costs.

In the next article, I will discussion how the Simile Timeline and Exhibit applications are like new perspectives on our data.

Commercial Real Estate Property Banks as described in previous articles on this blog were written for you to discover. General discussion of the underlying technology did not go in to depth because it is only important that it is easy to use, intuitive and displays capabilities that make you more competitive and profitable. Marketing efforts in any real estate business is also part social networking and knowing the needs of your customers. And like so many other things on the Web these days, everyone tries to tell everyone else about themselves first with home pages, resumes, or publishing.

Other software that tries to capture these relationships in business are Customer Management Relationship (CRM) applications. A good CRM is a sales persons life blood. There is however another move afoot on the Web that takes an innovative approach called Friend Of A Friend.

The Friend Of A Friend is architecturally and structurally the same as a Property Bank. The Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) project is creating a Web of machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do. According to the FOAF project, “FOAF is about your place in the Web, and the Web’s place in our world. FOAF is a simple technology that makes it easier to share and use information about people and their activities (eg. photos, calendars, weblogs), to transfer information between Web sites, and to automatically extend, merge and re-use it online.”

My, this sounds like what we have been talking about with Property Banks. The idea behind FOAF is simple: the Web is all about making connections between things (i.e. finding an investment property). FOAF provides some basic machinery to help us tell the Web about the connections between the things that matter to us. Using FOAF, you can help machines understand your home page, and through doing so, learn about the relationships that connect people, places and things described on the Web. FOAF uses W3C’s RDF technology to integrate information from your home page with that of your friends, and the friends of your friends, and their friends…

If you have installed the Piggy-Bank extension into your Firefox Web Browser, you can go to the PropertyClubPro.com home page and see a brief sample FOAF by invoking the coin icon at the bottom right hand corner of your browser to see how this enhances a web page. Again, this is unstructured information that is not stored in a database. So image if you wanted to maintain your business social contacts and customers in this format. Your contacts may already be using this and if so pointing to each others FOAF will likely get you spidered and indexed for discovery. To find out more about FOAF go to http://www.foaf-project.org and even though this is a modest technology maybe you will have a FOAFCORP or Corporate Fiends Of Friends one day.