Q&A with Mark Shacknies, CEO of MyDealBook

MyDealBook is another new site that is focused on tapping into the “wisdom of the crowds”, though it is geared towards the commercial (rather than residential) real estate market. In order to learn more about the company, I decided to do a short e-mail Q&A with Mark Shacknies, the Founder and CEO of MyDealBook. Here’s my questions along with Mark’s responses:

Q: What inspired you to start MyDealBook?

I was a frustrated real estate developer in an inefficient (commercial) real estate market.

As you know, the industry is dominated by walled gardens (some call it the “ole boys networks”) that leverage information asymmetries to the few privileged key holders.

The built environment is something we all share, so the development process, which creates it, needs to be more collaborative.

I want to fan the flames of real estate innovation.

Q: What does MyDealBook do?

MyDealBook (”MDB”) is a free, open real estate marketplace and collaboration community. The goal is to bring everyone to one site and then harness the “wisdom of the crowds” for everyone’s benefit.

It is a participatory peer community where members post a small profile, company info, and their projects (or deals). So this builds a marketplace around this 3D association of people - companies - deals. On top of this we layer a robust collaboration suite so that you can truly bring the best to your project. Other features include RSS, real estate news, community tumblr, and a job board.

(I am also a huge advocate of green building. And this is a classic situation where the lack of collaboration is stifling progress. Real estate commands a whopping 40% tax on our resources. The answers to reduce our impact are out there. So if we all come together, and bring the wisdom of the crowds, we can and will figure it out.)

Q: What technology platform are you using? Did you build everything or weave together existing tools?

We used the agile and open web framework Ruby on Rails. From a hardware perspective we engineered our platform to work with amazon’s storage cloud to allow for unlimited and redundant storage for all our users. The part of the system that performs the calculations was engineered to work in a distributed manner, the result is we can easily handle gigantic amounts of traffic while providing world class up-time and performance. Our project is custom engineered by an international team of rockstars.

Q: What is the “value add” or value proposition for real estate professionals?

A free real estate marketplace and community. By participating you access “just in time expertise” at your finger tips that will distribute knowledge into everyone’s decisions.