Values diluted? Electronic mediation and transparency

Credit crunch is on the move. We hear about it, and just last week I came to realise how it is affecting real people. I say 'real' because the media hype does not help much to see the reality.

The UK property market (the little I know after searching for flats to let in one area and flats to buy in another) seems saturated. Lots of properties to let and to sell. Two main websites can be used to locate properties: rightmove and findaproperty. Both show more or less the same properties. Both offer maps and now street views. One of them can tell you about crime statistics and council tax rates, together with property sales in the area.

Other websites offer advice. Banks offer you guidance on mortgages. Others allow you to compare mortgage products. Even the UK government has its own website (financial services authority) to tell you more about mortgages, rates, and the whole process of buying a property.

Sophisticated websites, mapping technologies, even chatting facilities with advisors, with simulators about how much you can borrow, how much you will pay for your mortgage. That is all fine and well in a market that might not be saturated.

What websites do not show you (or do it in a very polite way with messages like "on behalf or the mortgagees we have received an offer of...") is the desperation of people. I went round two properties last week end which happened to be repossesed. It was disheartening. Seals around the fridge, freezer, evidence that furniture had been thrown away, and a feeling that once there was a home in there. Now I can understand why a prize awarded to a best photo taken in the US in 2008 showed how some owners left in a rush their property, as if they had been a bomb raid.

Electronic mediation would aim to be transparent, but at the moment is showing little of this side of the situation. Websites cannot show desperation and one wonders if they will ever do so. Of course we still need intermediaries (banks, property agencies and the like), because that is how we have built modern society. But we also need perhaps another type of intermediary which can show us the reality of those who have been negatively affected, we might be able to do something about their situation.

What can technology do? We can reflect the reality, and try to connect minds with hearts, problems with solutions. In my view, a more ethically driven intermediation for reality.

I know that this might sound idealistic, and that there are already questions to my suggestion. Some IT savvy people might say: Tell us more concretely what you expect us to do (for instance a website to share stories or to look for possible buyers, but this is what we already have in place). Well, the current situation is a cold call for everyone of us! All I can say is that there is an immense number of possibilities. I am not a prophet, only someone who has been looking at properties recently. We could build communities to share knowledge about how to beat the crises, to match needs with solutions. I have checked some electronic forums about the credit crunch. There are some which offer advice, others that have campaigns to reduce the price of property.

There could be a response to my request: Welcome to the market, this is how it works. People are driven by their own goals. My reply would be: Is this not what has contributed greatly to the situation we have at the moment? Can we not all think of not having the cake and eating it?

A more systemic response could be devised to the credit crunch: We all have a foot print in society, and perhaps it is time to review it. How we live, and how our single mindedness towards achieving certain goals might not be in tune with our wider environment.