Selling houses with fuzzy logic

Isn't searching for a house online addictive?

You spend hours and hours at the computer, changing sites, varying search parameters, taking virtual tours etc. If your seriously moving then you do this every day so you can catch the latest properties. Is it addictive? Or does it just take hours because traditional house hunting search engines like Right Move, just don't work like we need them too? In my experience, In order to find that dream house, you need to enter parameters so wide that hundreds of properties are returned, almost all unsuitable and your left to trawl through each one looking for the one or two possibilities. In this day and age shouldn't the computer be doing that? Yes!

It's my belief that house hunting search engines are fundamentally flawed because they use boolean logic. Things are either true or false, 1 or 0. A house either has 4 bedrooms or it doesn't. It's priced under £400K or it isn't. But searching for a house isn't a true or false search. You may want 4 bedrooms, but a 3 bed house with room for an extension might be ok if the other factors were also strong. Boolean logic can't cope with this. Things get much worse when you add more and more search parameters in i.e. detached, 4 beds, 400K, Drive, Garage, study. Let's look at two approaches.

If you AND these factors together then only houses that have all 6 will be returned, unlikely.

If you OR these together and rank on number of matches (like a search engine) then you typically get hundreds of houses returned.

I think you'd get much better results if your search applied fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth, rather than absolutes. Rather than a yes or no, it's under 400K or not, yes or no. Its a 'yes, nearly, not quite, not really, no' type of thing. Rather than looking at criteria as pass or fail, 1 or 0, Fuzzy Logic scores them and come up with a holistic view. You score the search against the parameters and include near misses.

Estate agents would argue they been doing this for years, and given the increasing trend to do away with estate agents, they'd be wise to press this angle. If your estate agent is good you might get a call like this?

"Hello Mr Hanlon, its Laura from the Estate Agents. We've got a new property on the market that I think you may be interested in. It hasn't got the 4 beds that you wanted but it's in a really great location, large back garden, drive for 5 cars and the possibility to extend. I thought you might be interested. Give me a ring back when you can".

The estate agent here used fuzzy logic to judge that whilst this property didn't tick the boxes exactly, it scored highly across a number of categories to warrant looking at. How many people have ever given something 9.5 out of ten? or used a rule of thumb? All of these are examples of fuzzy logic in action. Our brains see things as shades of grey, rather than black or white. So how does this all relate to Business Intelligence? Well it's one reason why dashboard reporting can miss the mark.

OK but what do we learn from this.?

Estate agents could re-learn from retailers that's it's important to listen to your customer and give them what they want. They have the edge over search engines and they should work hard to exploit it.

Fuzzy logic is the way all things in the future will work. More of this later...

PS A friend of mine, Jamie Thompson, can also see the benefits of Fuzzy Logic, why not read some of his posts in his blog, SSIS Junkie.