A Property Bank is equivalent to a Semantic Bank. And, you can think of a Property Bank as an extension to the Piggy Bank Semantic Web Browser.

Any person can create one with a simple text editor. Using the data from your property listing, all you have to do is put the information about your property into the RDF format and stick the file on your Web Server. One property is nice, many are wonderful. Editing though gets monotonous and prone to typo or syntax errors. And, since you probably have no clue what RDF is all about you would resort to getting some technical help first. Consequently, there are other ways to create a Property Bank.
These include:

• RDFizers - a utility that converts from one format to RDF (i.e., examples, xls to rdf, or email to rdf).
• Database Mappers - listings in a database that you can SPARQL query on.
• Database Scrapers - Utility that queries a database and writes RDF.

Why have a Property Bank? 1st a Bank can be browsed. 2nd, a Bank in RDF can be searched semantically, something that is going to be more Web prevalent fairly soon. Browsing a Bank gives customers more power to manipulate, mashup, save or share your listings. Customers can build their own Bank on the fly for retrospective analysis. Searching on the other hand will allow a result that is more direct and accurate.

Storage is always a question. If a Bank is not in a database then where is it? There are various ways to store a Bank.

1. In a single RDF file exposed on a Web Server.
2. Hosted by the Longwell Semantic Web Browser on a server.
3. Hosted as a Semantic Bank on a Web Server password protected.
4. Assimilated in memory by the Piggy Bank Semantic Web Browser until saved locally or saved to a Semantic Bank.

So if every real estate agency had their property listings in a RDF file either stored on their own Web Server or on PropertyClubPro.com they would only need that single instance in the virtual data space of the Internet. Customers would actually either find the Bank from a search or are shopping across Realtor Web sites, they can discover, aggregate each listing for comparative analysis and save it to their own local Piggy Bank. Very clever if you ask me. Discovery of a Bank with many more than 1 property is very easy to search with the faceted browsing abilities of Piggy Bank or Longwell. If you created more than one Bank or RDF file let’s say one for commercial, another for residential and a third for redeveloped properties an investor using Piggy Bank could visit your site and aggregate all three Banks. Properties when saved to secondary Banks can be tagged for further classification.

You may be selling a property for a customer or business that wants confidentiality. So how do you expose the property and maintain privacy? In other words you are only interested in sharing it with your clients. Using a Property Bank you can still share it privately and not publish it by keeping it in a password protected Bank.

What happens when one Bank RDF file is different from another? In other words some properties naturally have more features to present. The Semantic Web Browsers handle that naturally and aggregate to facets so there is no incompatibility as one might expect. This automatically implies that your property data is extensible should more information become known about it later on.

At PropertyClubPro.com we will provide you with the interface to maintain your inventory and its status without your having to worry about the particulars of generating Property Banks or any technical aspects of writing RDF. As you start to enter property listings, we will initially generate Property Banks nightly and later custom Banks for use at your own discretion. We will also have this available shortly for residential properties and come out with the specifications for navigation of national to regional down to Banks by state.

It is not our suggestion that producing these is because Property Banks are cool. Rather, it pre-qualifies a customer that traces back to you, the listing agent in a more direct path having found what they are looking for due to a lower signal to noise ratio during the search and analysis process customers often go through.

What is more important, your Web Site Content or Your Inventory? From my standpoint and having worked in retail during high school, Inventory always seemed to be king. And, even in the CRE industry that seems to be reinforced even more by the way people use the Internet. Yes, what we sold was important and the display and shelf positioning was key in optimized sales of high margin items.

If you are paying more attention to your day to day business the Web Site tends to become static without constant attention to content refreshment with the exception of syndication.

Now, look at how the Inventory is handled today. I am not saying it is bad, but it could be significantly better. It reminds me of the job market when you put your resume out on the Internet. The first thing you know every so called head shop is spamming it across the globe. And something funny, it never lands a job because it is not getting into the hands of the right people. I think this is the analog to real estate listings today. Everybody’s bulletin board site is picking them up, they are spammed like unregulated syndication and the listings are not finding the customers. If a customer starts to see a property on a dozen different sites they almost feel like it not special. When I go to a site to search for properties I probably have the misguided hope that each has a unique set of properties in their Inventory.

I think there are 2 ways to look for a property.First, I like to shop so typically I go directly to the agents site and avoid the bulletin board sites. At least I am sure that properties listed by one agent are not going to be on any other agents site. The 2nd way to shop is to search so that you go directly and exactly to what you want. This is not yet realized on the Web but it is coming with the Semantic Web.