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It frustrates me that there are so many "information programs" like these that are computationally easy to solve but rely on the free availability of information. Sadly, companies like athome.lu have no interest in sharing this data and so here we are in 2022, still having to manually search multiple sites.

In Internet olden times, we dreamed about automated agents that would run searches on your behalf, scour the web to compare prices and hunt down things you were interested in. But user-centric fantasies like this don't make fortunes, so walled gardens is what we ended up with.



This is why companies must be forced to make their data available. The value that could be unleashed is insane.


athome.lu is specifically selling the 'search all listings' functionality, though. If they had to make this data available they wouldn't be interested in making the data in the first place, since it'd basically be charity work for whoever else is interested in throwing that data into elasticsearch and creating a frontend for it whilst undercutting athome.


What a hot take. I want more public data as much as anyone, but forcing companies to make an asset “available” hasn’t worked out so well historically.


How would bankrupting these companies would unleash value, exactly?


How is mandatory data reporting linked to bankruptcy? The more information available to the market, the better and more efficient they run.


All it would do is create a race to the bottom. Athome seems to be a data aggregator of many listing sites; I can see open data on the actual apartment lister’s end being useful (ie. Apartments.com) but athome is the ones doing the aggregation, so if they had to turn the data over they just wouldn’t create that data in the first place since there would be no revenue stream for doing so.


A race to the bottom is exactly what society wants for housing. Fat margins should be eliminated.




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