Expected Impact

1. Expected Benefit for the Participant Organizations

The project intends to support faster, better and evidence-based decision making by combining the intuitive power of maps with the analytical capabilities of GI systems and revealing trends and patterns that may not be detected in tabular data. The project will provide a competitive edge to the participating enterprises by offering custom geo-data service “packages”, as a minimum set of common datasets and services at the metadata repository level, that will allow for enhancing their traditional content with high-quality, accurate and location-based data, directly linked to the unique geographic characteristics of their listings’ content. The open and seamless access to the RE services developed in the project will enable participating enterprises to provide new innovative forms of services without any up-front capital or maintenance investment.

On the other hand, the two academic organizations will have a great opportunity to contribute with their research excellence on Web Archiving and Preservation, advanced technical solutions in harvesting, extracting, aggregating and curating contextual information related to RE properties from Web 2.0 sites. Last but not least, IMIS/SDS and FORTH will investigate the potential of creating innovative spin-off SMEs that will further enhance research in the fields that the project deals with.

2. Benefits for the Participants and especially for the Enterprises

The industrial participants will exploit the project results from promoting their business development strategy, conserve existing jobs and create new ones, while improving their business and financial effectiveness. The aforementioned benefits will be achieved through the improvement of the current provided services, the provision of novel consulting and transaction services that fall within their business strategy. The industrial partners that participate in the project, namely, TREK Consulting and RE/MAX Elite, will develop their individual business plans for further exploiting the project results and gaining a competitive advantage in the Greek real-estate market.

3. Benefits for the National Economy, Society, Environment

The real-estate sector on Greece is characterized as the “steam-engine” of the development process, while affecting several other sectors of the Greek economy. In 2011, the Greek real estate market seemed to be in a transitional period. According to statistics from real estate agents, there was a rapid decline in business activity that unofficially reached 50%. Although being in the most difficult period since 1950, however, the Greek Association of Realtors and RE Consultants has concluded that the Greek RE sector has entered a transition period, offering opportunities for investments in RE.

To this end the project will achieve direct positive impact, not only for the participating RE SMEs, but also for the majority of the Greek RE agents. The provision of improved and advanced services will lead RE agents and SMEs to increase their transactions number, and subsequently their net profits, and will give them the opportunity to further invest on improving their services. Moreover the project aims to open the Greek real estate market worldwide and offer the opportunity to international investors and individuals to find attractive investment opportunities in the Greek real estate market within a multilingual service provision framework.

Finally the impact of the project, beyond the financial one, improves the following sectors: Quality of life and Safety; Health; Working Conditions; Employment; Data Accountability and Environment.

4. Techno-economic feasibility study for the optimum use of new / improved products or services

Business partners of the project will be offered the opportunity for commercially exploiting the project’s tangible results and developing viable business models, while follow-up dissemination activities after the end of the project will include demonstration of the Real Estate 2.0 services for selected use cases (involving specific property types) to targeted stakeholders identified by the project’s exploitation strategy. The commercial exploitation of the project results will allow business partners to gain a competitive advantage in the Greek real estate market and increase their revenues and profits.