B. Mann Consulting

Congratulations to Ben Wong for the launch of Sutton.com. Sutton is one of Canada's largest real estate companies, and it now has a nice and clean "Web 2.0" style website. Well, maybe not THAT web 2.0 – a distinct lack of tag clouds :P

What it does have is a Drupal powered backend, cleanly designed HTML and highly search engine friendly structure.

It was very nice of Ben to mention Bryght as part of the team that put Sutton.com together. Actually this was something that I and other members of the team were involved in even before there was a Bryght. In reality, most of the kudos should go to Ben himself, who is not only a programming and sysadmin ninja, but also did a great job of managing the dev team to see this to completion. And of course, Dave Shea's Bright Creative consultancy is who did the great design.

I'll be watching this site with interest, and hope Ben will give us a report on traffic and other commentary in a month or so from now. I know there are many more possibilities waiting in the wings, especially now that they've got a web application framework in the form of Drupal underneath. Who knows, they might even add tag clouds... 

Want to know State of Real Estate and the Web in Canada? Just read Ben Wong's stuff over at Mostly Geek:

We’re deep in web2.0 and data is flying everywhere. However, real estate listings in Canada are pretty much still stuck in web1.0. When I read stories about listing aggregators like Zillow.com with millions of listings in the US, I can’t help but let out a long *sigh* about the state of things in Canada.

I worked with Ben on some projects at Sutton Group. I got a chance to break my head around the many nuances of the real estate business. Just when I thought I understood everything and the various business and regulatory aspects, there would be another layer, I'd swear a lot, and throw out my design for open real estate data.

This is part one from Ben, where he's going to walk us through the issues around the real estate data walled garden issue in Canada. Remember, this *is* a tipping point kind of thing. Right now, virtually all the value is inside the walled garden silo, with very little information sitting in the "open" silo. But, as the open silo grows, it accrues value a lot more quickly than the walled garden ever can, and there will come a tipping point. Really, the only way to prevent complete open-ness is for the walled garden itself to take steps to become more open.