About

What is orbit?

ORBIT is a real estate meta-search engine platform that indexes thousands of listings from hundreds of different agencies, daily. We gather and compile publicly available facts about the supply, demand, prices of goods and services and other information which is not subject to copyright or other property claims.

Our platform is built on top of a marketplace-wide database, created and ever growing through the collection and processing of exclusive and publicly available real estate data. By capturing and storing information from all available sources, matching duplicate listings to each other and flagging the differences, ORBIT is able to interpret and present a highly accurate overall picture of the real estate market.

With a database that is fast growing, it shall soon reach a stage where it becomes one of the largest sources of real estate information in South Africa. With such valuable real time data, the ability for individuals and companies to track, analyze and predict has become far superior to any other tools utilized by a single agency or available in the marketplace.

What are we solving?

Overall Market Picture

With real estate data and property listings dispersed across hundreds of platforms, websites, marketplaces and agencies, forming an accurate overview of the market at any point in time is nearly impossible. Agencies and professionals do not have the time to manually collect and compile data from all sources across the country, resulting in decision making that is based on limited information, and a view of the market that is lacking valuable inputs. ORBIT is able to provide a more consolidated and complete source of information, showing a more extensive overall market picture and allowing for more informed decision making.

Listing Inconsistencies

When properties are listed on more than one platform, or by more than one agency, inconsistencies are common. These inconsistencies appear not only in the prices of the listings (differences ranging up to 37%), but also in some of the other attributes and features being reported (e.g. bedrooms and bathrooms, living area and erf size). Different platforms factor in different nuances in different ways, creating inconsistencies in data and making it more challenging to directly compare different properties – and insights about different property groupings. ORBIT is able identify which specific listings are common across platforms and listing locations and, by doing so, flag these inconsistencies and discrepancies.

Monitor Listings and Competition

For real estate agencies, competition is tough, and it can be time consuming to identify and keep track of listings in their portfolio that are being advertised on other platforms, and with competing agencies. There is also no efficient way for agencies to stay up-to-date how these listings change in price or whether they change in status. If time needs to be spent manually monitoring, compiling and reporting on these matters, it detracts from other value creation tasks which could further grow their business. ORBIT is able to monitor and flag this, and related information, shortly after any changes occur.

Limited insight into market trends and statistics

Real estate companies and investors rely on market trends and statistics to position themselves for success in the industry. However, when, it comes to finding in depth and accurate information about the markets in which they operate, their options are limited. Current solutions are built on unsophisticated, incomplete and sometimes inaccurate data. This limits the ability to make well-informed decisions and draw conclusions on macro and micro market trends, resulting in a delayed identification of trends, missed opportunities, suboptimal decision making and resource allocation. ORBIT keeps track of nearly all listings available on the internet and is able to produce unique and market-leading insights and statistics, enabling professionals to better leverage themselves for success.

Key Features for Professionals

Portfolio Monitoring

The ORBIT platform acts as a tool that real estate agencies can use to monitor their listing portfolios in greater detail than what was previously possible. It allows them to identify and monitor listings of theirs which their competitors also list, giving them the ability to monitor price changes and to flag and validate any discrepancies. These same tools can be utilized by real estate professionals or individuals who wish to monitor a watchlist or portfolio of listings of their choosing. Customizable alerts can be set up to alert users of particular changes to their portfolio of listings, or to the listings which they choose to keep track of.

1. Exclusivity Monitoring
   For real estate agencies, having a full view of the market, grants ORBIT users the ability to validate exclusivity of their listings. There are several examples in our database of properties which are claimed to be exclusive, despite being listed elsewhere. We survey and alert agencies if their listing appears elsewhere on the web. This same tool can be used by real estate investors or individuals to identify properties that are being listed by specific or individual agencies, as well as by private sellers.
2. Property Delisting
   From our observations, agencies can take up to 3 months before they realize that their property has been sold by another agency and update their listings accordingly. Using ORBIT, agencies can be alerted of any changes in the status of the listings they monitor, allowing them to remain better informed about their portfolio.
3. Price Competition
   When listings appear on multiple locations, users can be kept fully updated of any updates to, or reductions in, the price of listings within their portfolio. This allows them to evaluate and stay informed of changing situations, in short time period.

Listing Tools and Insights

The listing tools relate to additional information, data and insights which are provided for each individual listing on the ORBIT Platform. This information is built up from the data history, as well as by aggregating information from various other sources, where available. The result is an assortment of valuable information, combining some of the primary factors that are considered when assessing real estate.

1. Listing History
   The full history of the listing, across all platforms on which it is listed, are given. Displaying information such as when it was added onto each, when price changes occurred, and when agencies mark the property as sold, or it is delisted. This creates a seamless way to gain an instant view of how each property that are listed by individuals or private sellers on platforms such as Private Property, Property24 and Gumtree, are identified and can be filtered on the ORBIT platform. This allows users to easily find and view all properties that are not within the portfolio of any real estate agency.
2. Favourites
   Users can create a watch-list of favourite properties, allowing them to quickly check up on those which they wish to keep track of. They can additionally create alerts to notify them whenever changes are made to the properties.
3. Alerts
   Fully customizable alerts can be set up to notify users of any changes to the market place or to properties which they have favourited. They can be notified of price changes, delistings, or when properties that match their selected criteria are listed on any of the platforms. Users will also be able to subscribe to alerts for properties we believe that are underpriced and with high rental yields.

Marketplace Statistics

Utilizing its extensive dataset, ORBIT is able to apply statistical analysis and data science tools to calculate and report on a handful of marketplace statistics, all in real time. These statistics are able to provide valuable insights into the overall market, suburbs and listings themselves. The industry is constantly changing both in terms of the consumer market and professional landscape. Staying up to date on the latest real estate statistics is a great way to ensure players are well positioned for success in a very competitive field.

Automated Valuation Models 

Great predictions begin with one imperative – you need a lot of data. And lucky for us, we do have a lot of data. And clean one. Mixed with strong expertise in the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science, we have developed the most accurate AVM in the industry. Accordingly, every property profile that you find in our platform will have a estimated price attached.

Why is our data better?

As previously mentioned on the tabs before, the same house can be listed by multiple agencies under very different prices and other metrics. Find the example below which refers to the same property.

In this example, the three different agencies have agreed on the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and erf size but not the living area. To predict the correct living area of this property, we recur to the principle of Wisdom of the Crowd, which in other words means, the collective opinion of a group of individuals rather than that of a single expert.

Accordingly, we first exclude the obvious incorrect details about the property (such as Housing Prop living area), and then proceed to calculate the median of  the values which we believe to be correct. In this case our estimated prediction for the living area would be 525 square meters ((500+550)/2).

Let’s see another example

In this case, based on the collective judgement of the same property, we can predict that this property’s real values are 4 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 280m2 living area and 442m2 of erf size. Note that if we hadn’t matched Housing Prop’s information, the living area would be unknown to us.

These steps above are crucial for building a clean database and thus representative and accurate statistics and valuations. While a standard Automated Valuation Model (AVM) would consider all these listings above as 7 different properties (even with wrong details), ORBIT’s AVM operates knowing that we only refer to 2 different properties and takes only into account the correct details and estimated real values.

Is this legal?

Yes! ORBIT operates like any other search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Accordingly, ORBIT only collects and indexes listings and factual listing information which is publicly available on the Internet. Additionally, we do not intend to index websites whose authors do not want their materials listed in our search results. If an author or publisher does not want their listings to be posted in our search results, then we shall remove that portion of the search results and previously gather information without notice. We respect the principles and regulations established by general search engines and we display only publicly available content and follow robot.txt search engine restrictions.

For more information on this please check our Terms & Conditions.