New iPhone app could prove a nightmare for home vendors

The new app could soon become the weapon of choice for those looking at buying or renting an apartment to find out if the location could become undesirable due to a new development.

It could be used, for example, to learn whether prospective views might soon be obstructed.

Founder of non-profit organisation OpenAustralia Matthew Landauer, 38, from the Blue Mountains in NSW, is the developer of the app. It’s early days yet, but Landauer said that the app had already been used 200 times since its launch on July 16.

He received a $30,000 grant from the federal government last year to create a website that showcased local council property development proposals as part of the Government 2.0 Taskforce set up by Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner.

Planningalerts.org.au was launched in December and is getting about 10,000 unique visitors and about 30,000 page views a month, Landauer said. There are just under 1500 confirmed email alerts for those using the site to stay up to date with nearby property development proposals.

However, instead of just leaving the website after it was created for the federal government, Landauer has now extended its development to the iPhone 3GS and Android smartphones.

“It’s built using an app called Layar, which is sort of a general kind of augmented reality app,” Landauer said in a telephone interview. “And what we then do is take the data from Planningalerts.org.au and feed it into that in the form that it wants and then it can display it in this amazing way where you can turn your phone around and can see what’s happening,” he said.

Planningalerts.org.au has 85 Australian councils’ development proposals listed and so far includes about 28,000 individual applications. It works by web scraping data listed on authorities’ websites and can be made somewhat automatic after knowing how data is listed on them.

“In web scraping the development applications from council websites we write a program that simulates what a person does when they navigate through the website,” Landauer said.

“The program clicks on links, fills out forms to do searches, and then when the program finds the web page with the development application it has to extract the unstructured information on the page and turn it into structured information,” he said.

This was “a very painful and error prone process”, said Landauer, because OpenAustralia had to write a special web scraper tool for every single local council website.

“Of course, if the council provided the information in a structured machine-readable format (like XML or geoRSS) things would be a whole lot easier,” he said. One of the few councils that did this was Mosman Council in NSW, he said.

“We hope that more councils will follow suit,” he added.

With the site now populated with thousands of applications, and with the release of the new iPhone 3GS and Android app, Landauer said OpenAustralia was now being contacted by local councils regularly wanting to know how they could get their development applications on to Planningalerts.org.au.

“We’ve focused on councils with the largest populations initially so that we get the best bang for the buck,” he said.

Landauer said there are over 650 local councils in Australia. The site is now trying to crowdsource its efforts to gain access to the data of more authorities.

“We have a very long way to go before we have full coverage of the country, but so far we’re doing quite well as the councils we have covered are among the largest,” Landauer said.

Asked whether he thought real estate agents would like the application due to the fact that they have the job of selling homes regardless of whether nearby development proposals were occurring, Landauer said that he believed they were going to “hate it and love it” at the same time.

“It’s one of those things where I expect what will happen … is that some of the real estate websites will pick up on the service that we provide and actually republish development applications that come from our site on their site,” he said.

A Sydney-based real estate agent who wished to remain anonymous said the new app would be “quite a useful tool, especially for buyers”.

The agent knew of properties being sold in a certain estate on the basis that any new developments would probably not impact on views. “But it certainly has from what I’ve seen,” the agent said.

“I think that it’s really horrible when agents do that, but unfortunately in the industry it does happen,” the agent said.

Last week OpenAustralia launched election leaflet monitoring website electionleaflets.org.au.

More information on the app is available at OpenAustralia blog.