As for the big answer to the question of balance, I think the first step is having people in our industry get their head wrapped around this notion of just how big and important buying a home is and demand that their MLS’s, their vendors and everyone who touches their search platform rise to that occasion and built something better. Now.

Not to overly simplify the matter but with all this negatively that surrounds RPR, when boiled down to a nutshell those in opposition are essentially preventing better data to be made available to the people who need it most – consumer through the delivery of their agents.

There mere reality is real estate, MLS’s, etc., have a supply of amazing data and access to a million agents with street knowledge. Merging this data with technology to make it engaging and beneficial is the easy part. Convincing every power that be that doing it is best thing this industry can do – there were impossibly wafts into the equation.

I think the big question about a Pandora like tool is how to balance the fun of searching with the biggest purchase of your life. Would a tool like that help me narrow down my search or is it more of a game for the interested shopper as Marc remarked?

At the time Bluescape felt more gimmicky than it was practical. Still sorta does. My interaction with it is more game like than it is practical and intuitive. Not dissing it as I admire the attempts but the system doesn’t seem to learn and/or possess a consciousness. Pandora on the other hand does. The question is, how can we make this happen for real in our business?

It will take one of two things happening to really see this blow up.

1. A Local Board/MLS says, “we’ve had enough, we’re going to become industry leaders. If you want to be a part of our awesome MLS, you’re going to have to provide a really high standard of data for each of your listings.”

2. A brokerage with a lot of online weight, one of the national franchises, or someone like Big T or Big Zlo will have to develop this awesome system and way of helping people find homes. It will be so awesome that agents/mls’s will want to have their listings show up and will have to raise the bar on the data they provide as to not get left out.

I hope to see it happen one day. There IS a better way to search real estate. It’s so simple that most people don’t realize what it is (well, those with the proper funding ), but we’ll get there one day.

Interesting tool but that’s not really what I had in mind. Pandora doesn’t ask you to rate a hundred songs before it starts playing music, it just does and learns from what you listen to.

I find that it’s important to start showing properties as soon as possible. The idea is to learn from every property view to help suggest other properties, not replace the current search criterias with pictures of birds.

I find the pictures on BlueScape to be a little too abstract or vague and the system doesn’t narrow down based on my choices.

I voted down on a landscape picture and voted up on a cab in downtown NYC. I would expect the system to understand I’m looking for something in a city but judging by the next photos, it didn’t seem like my message got through.

The user doesn’t really feel like he’s making progress.

Building that experience into Real Estate search would be equally mind blowing. The process, the algorithms the testing… All challenges for sure, but like Marc said – anything is possible.