An inventory doesn’t have to clutter up a listing - having it available as a pdf download can be sufficient to add value to the listing and attract more visitors. This gives managers and owners the opportunity to add more detail that may not be appropriate on a traditional web page.

That is, the problem of working out that ‘TV’ and ‘HDTV’ are similar, and clustering them accordingly, is basically the same problem as the online retailers have in finding ‘related products’. Not only have amazon/ebay/froogle/etc. got *very* good at solving that over the past decade, there are also companies dedicated entirely to dealing with it, and providing plug-in services.

Then you get into the problem that websites often don’t include the full list of amenities, just the things that they think will win them customers. And they’ll often be too general, saying ‘fully-equipped kitchen’ rather than listing the oven, the microwave, etc. But property managers do have complete inventories of everything in the house - they need to, so they can tell when something gets broken or goes missing. It’s just a question of persuading them to open up those lists to the world.

Anyway, I’m excited that flipkey is thinking about these problems. Just don’t despair; you may not be able to solve them completely, but if you find the right approach you can probably find some ways of improving the current situation.