Somehow the idea of aggregation seems appealing and the business model behind the idea is probably weak at best. It is difficult to take serious any snippet postings on sites where they bid out software development without sound software engineering functional specifications. Obviously the application has not been thought out through a logical life cycle in detail.

I have scraped many web sites for commercial real estate listings. While many of the bulletin board real estate listing services like to think they own the data, in reality the guy who is marketing his commercial property wants the most exposure he or she can get. So they will list on every possible venue. It seems almost ludicrous to say the owner of the property does not also own the information/data which describes the features and attributes of the listing. After all listing your place for sale is not condemnation by power of eminent domain on the Internet.

Scraping web sites has a 2 fold problem. First, the quality of the data by mining other web sites is pretty lousy. It is either lacking details or it is old and useless. Second, is a problem of presentation. I think the second problem has to do with perspective. Either you are a legacy technology person trying to invent new ways of using relatively old infrastructure, or you are bold person willing to build Web 2.0 technology which can be risky. I find working within the context of Web 2.0 that I am not happy with using the same old relational database technology for search and presentation. Thus, I experimented with the concept of building Property Banks. Property Banks put me into a whole new dimension on how I view property for sale or lease without the use of a database. In order to do this, I utilized the Solvent screen scraping tool and stored the listings into Property Banks that can be kept private or made public. Then, I used the Firefox extension from MIT Simile project called Piggy Bank to view the listings in my Property Bank. This is where I feel the value of aggregation is real.

If you are simply scraping to aggregate into a database, you end up with redundancy to the point where everyone looks syndicated. And being an investor, realize you still have to work much harder than simply finding a property listing on bulletin board service somewhere because it goes back to the quality of your data and the analytics you can perform on that information for selling or purchasing a good investment.