 | |||
|
Wednesday April 24 2002 Web Services and the Real Estate Industry House Buying Made Easier Printer-friendly
HTML version In selected industries, such as Finance, Insurance, and Travel, companies are already beginning to tap into the power of Web Services, enabling them to integrate easily with new business partners, provide powerful new services to consumers, and position themselves for long term growth. This article focuses on how Web Services can revolutionize the Real Estate Industry. We concentrate on the residential real estate industry, identifying the complex nature of a real estate transaction. We present ideas on how Web Services can be used to streamline these interactions. Technological Challenges Faced by the Real Estate Industry The rapid change in technology affects the interactions between the different parties involved in a single real estate transaction, such as the buyer, seller, their agents, their mortgage and title companies, and various other parties such as home inspectors, property appraisers, notaries, home insurance agents, and so on. Web Services technology allows these individuals or companies to interact and achieves a better, faster, cheaper, and more reliable way of conducting business. The following diagram shows the typical interactions for the purchase or sale of a single home. Everybody needs to talk to everyone else. The amateur buyer or seller is stuck in the midst of various real estate professionals:
Individuals seeking to engage in some sort of a real estate deal can go online and get quotations from various real estate agents, and read a lot of interesting articles and tips on how to choose an agent, how to buy or sell a house, and so on. One such site is Home Gain (http://www.homegain.com/). From there they can go to another Web site, such as Priceline (http://www.priceline.com/), where they provide their financial information and have various mortgage companies bid for their loan. Then they could go to a third Web site such as ImproveNet (http://www.improvenet.com/), to find contractors for home repairs. After all this, there are still large amounts of paperwork involved as well as the management of finances, taxes, and insurance. As an end-user, they need a real estate portal or community
that provides them all of the above and much more without having to go
through all the trouble. A community portal that can provide these
features seamlessly to a client will be best positioned for long-term
success. A sample list of services the community portal could implement as
Web Services is shown below:
Benefits from Web Services If businesses expose their services using Web Services standards (SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI), a quick E-Marketplace of services can be formed, where individuals can potentially describe their requirements and allow the entire E-Marketplace of businesses to bid on their contract. This process can happen dynamically without ties to any community site, or being restricted by the businesses that the community site has registered. This is, however, a long-term vision. We do not see an E-Marketplace forming in the real-estate industry for at least the next two to three years. Business Drivers Currently, any new real estate firm (individual realtor, mortgage company, title company, home insurance broker, etc.) who wants to integrate with any of the existing real estate communities needs to spend weeks to months with traditional enterprise application integration (EAI). EAI is more difficult as the underlying applications can be built on different technologies such as Visual Basic, C++, Java, etc. Thus, by wrapping their existing business services as Web Services, they can extend the lifecycle of existing applications. The use of Web Services allows real estate firms to focus on new services and faster time to close a deal to gain competitive advantage and more exposure to clients. Technical Drivers There are significant technical drivers that push Web Services to become the technology platform of choice for real-estate applications:
Web Services Technologies The following diagram shows how the core Web Services technologies (SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL) can be used in a typical flow of messages between a buyer and the real estate agents and mortgage companies:
A SOAP message can be sent to a "find real estate agents" service with some search criteria. This service is one provided by a community site as described later. It can then use UDDI to return a list of agents. The contract between the buyer and agents can be negotiated using WSDL. Dynamic Discovery using UDDI As Web Services are adopted, real estate services can list themselves in UDDI repositories provided by companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and others. A typical UDDI listing for a real estate agent would include the following:
Message exchange using SOAP A real estate service could use their Visual Basic application to talk to a J2EE application using SOAP (via XML serialization), which is orchestrating Web Services such as the real-estate community. Defining Contracts using WSDL How do we find out what information is needed in order to exchange messages? The list of information needed by a mortgage company to process a loan application is defined in a WSDL file. The mortgage company defines the format for the input data, as well as the format and contents of the data it will return as a result of the loan processing. The Web Service orchestration platform will know how to interpret the WSDL file between the buyer and mortgage company. Case Study As an example, we will show how a basic Real Estate Community can be created using Web Services technologies. Problem Description In our example, we try to describe a community site that will manage and orchestrate real-estate transactions using Web Services technologies. We will describe how the following real-estate process can be converted into a collection of Web Services, and orchestrated through a community site. Our example shows a relatively simple five-step process for buying a house.
Some of the processes can be carried out in parallel, and asynchronously. This means that the services can be initiated simultaneously, and one does not need to wait for a reply from one service before going on to work on the other service. How can this be implemented? Implementing the above flow might seem like a lot of work. Assuming that the underlying applications exist at each of the service providers, creating the Web Services wrappers to these applications is a matter of a few hours. Various companies provide tools for the creation and deployment of Web Services. Collaxa has a full working example of this case study (for more details, see http://www.collaxa.com/dispatch.jsp?ref=wsa_app_source). Interfaces to various Web portals and services are implemented with XML Web Services leveraging the Collaxa Web Service Orchestration ServerTM. Full source code for this example is available from the Collaxa site. Note: This paper does not intend to recommend one product over the other, and merely uses the Collaxa product as a way of showing a real example. Conclusion Web Services will be the next revolution in the real estate B2B and B2C application space. In order to remain competitive, real estate businesses and portals must develop Web Services interfaces to their applications. Using these emerging standards, the total time and complexity to complete a real estate transaction can be shortened considerably with minimal integration costs. Real estate firms need to understand their existing applications and identify the functionality that needs to be exposed as part of their Web Services offerings. The use of standards such as XML, HTTP, and SOAP allow for easy integration with other services. The resulting integrated systems will allow the end-customer, a person trying to buy or sell a house, to be shielded from all the complexity of interacting with the various entities involved in this complex transaction. This article is an extract from Web Services Business Strategies and Architectures. Buy the book from Amazon.com Or purchase the extended PDF version of this article
from: Adobe Acrobat format (PDF) - 79K Keep up to date with all the new articles and features on
Web Services Architect: |
