Last week, StreetSine was fortunate to be featured in the Digital Life once again. This time, it was the innovative home report service that gained attention. More than 10,000 home reports were distributed to the hands of property hunters and agents. Many have given us glowing testimonials on the amount of information and analysis that our customized home report has provided for them.
Thank you all for your support. We hope to contribute in our own little way to avert the next property bubble in the market!
Hot property
442 words
23 September 2009
Digital Life
(c) 2009 Singapore Press Holdings Limited
Jeremy Lee, 31 Chief Technology Officer at StreetSine
Application: StreetSine.com, a real-estate data analytics Web portal with more than 1,000 unique visitors daily and over 51,000 property listings
JEREMY Lee loves to make order out of information chaos, inspired by his own frustrations with the property market's lack of transparency when shopping for a flat some years back.
'Our goal is to crunch all the raw property data sitting in silos everywhere and transform them into key information accessible to everyone, so that people can make better decisions,' he explains.
In fact, property hunters are willing to pay $25 a pop at StreetSine for in-depth reports that compare everything from PSF (per square foot) prices to rental yields for condominiums and houses.
StreetSine's Home Report tool, launched in May, has seen over 10,000 reports sold, helping the firm to record a five-figure sum in monthly revenues.
The portal's Java-based tools run like desktop applications but in a Web browser. They link to a sophisticated number-crunching engine built on open source tools like MySQL.
Within seconds, one click of the button transforms publicly available raw data - sourced from the likes of online property transaction records, Google Maps and property listings - into extensive research reports that are the dream of property agents everywhere.
One challenge Jeremy faced was getting StreetSine's interface to look and work the same across different browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox. Using the Google Web Toolkit framework resolved most of the browser consistency issues.
The engineering graduate from the National University of Singapore mastered Java Enterprise Edition and other open source software while working in the Defence Science and Technology Agency. He left after four years to set up StreetSine in 2007 with a partner.
Software developers today, Jeremy says, must be business-savvy.
Ergo, tie-ups with property firms are on the cards, while StreetSine's data analysis technology may also expand to other sectors, such as health-care or Government scenario planning.
'It's no longer about just writing code. We need to be more than just good programmers,' he notes.
'We need business experience and analysis skills too, so that we can improve the products we create for our users.'
Hence, he and his handful of freelance developers spend a quarter of their working hours on tech support and answering queries from customers, in their quest to improve the portal.
To Jeremy, software development is a calling.
'As a software developer, you have the ability to influence many lives with every line of code you write.'
