I was thinking this morning about finding a new home again. Every hermit crab must someday leave their shell. My thoughts were turned to the available information online and I came to the conclusion that despite the increase in availability of information to make the real estate market more transparent it has a long way to go. The big problem that I see is that people are still dealing with web pages and not XML data. I can go to the Boston Globe Online and find all the open houses in the area but if I wanted to track that over time and get a real time data feed all I can do is subscribe to an RSS data feed. The RSS feed doesn't provide any organizational/parametric features about the homes that would be helpful for automatically filtering or highlighing the ones that I am interested it. Instead it just gives a list with a link to the site where I can see more information. But I need to know things like listing price, square feet, proximity to T, sales history (has it been reduced? is it a new listing?), condo or home, taxes, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, neighborhood, date/time of open houses, etc. and I would rather not have to know any of these things unless some of them meet my basic requirements for a home. What I envision for a future to the real estate market is that somehow and somewhere each home is attached to a piece of changing data like a stock that has all of this parametric information in it. It might be managed by a realtor or by the owner through a public site. The home can then be located through either newspaper style web sites or advanced tools for visualizing and alerting me about my home search. I don't really want a realtor... I want a more transparent real estate market with Internet geeks working hard to get my attention with better ways to present the information that is publicly available. In a sense this has happened in the unstructured world of text search with folks like Google but for structured data like real estate, even with the Zillow's of the world, it is still not an easy process to see what you are looking for in the market. Maybe the real estate agents don't want this but as always -- the heretics like me are only the bad guys for the people in power. If the realtor folks listen to us and give us what we want then they can stay connected to real problems and provide real solutions of value in a changing world.