Have you ever wanted a platform that offered real-time insights about people, places, and property for everyone involved in real estate? Well look no further, WikiRealty is here!
According to the Founder & CEO of WikiRealty, Inc. Sanjay Kuttemperoor, his new website (www.wikirealty.com) is the smartest way to start investigating people, places and properties, before making a new home offer or choosing a business location in a new neighborhood.
“In 2010 I started seeing residential brokers use Facebook and Twitter to disseminate their messages,” he said. “The problems with those sites are that they are social sites, and the things that are put on them aren’t searchable. Real estate is a global industry so that doesn’t work. Everyone in the industry has information that the consumers want, and today it’s hard to get that real time information.”
Without a website like his, Kuttemperoor said for the consumer to get the information they wanted, they would have to go to the location they are looking into, and start conversing with whoever is in charge. This process, he says, is very inefficient.
“So I set out to create WikiRealty as a platform for the entire real estate ecosystem to contribute their hyper local knowledge.”
So what exactly is WikiRealty? It’s a website where people can gather to share neighborhood insight and objective data points about real estate opportunities all in one place – for the first time ever on the web.
WikiRealty’s mobile and web platform combines local wisdom with professional knowledge to serve individuals’ comprehensive information about the communities they care about. Neighborhood-specific content – developed by locals – is easily searchable by city, neighborhood or keyword, and is delivered with every real estate listing served by WikiRealty.
Kuttemperoor also said that community members (everyone who is involved in commercial and residential real estate) have the freedom to create content, ask questions, and search insightful insider information that can help them make more confident decisions on where to live or work.
“It’s connecting the dots and providing context for all of the information about a specific listing,” he said. “Another thing is that I have basically created a mini-google for real estate, where you can pull up all of the content on what you’re looking for, and then filter it by role.”
For example, if someone in Illinois were looking at a property in Naples, Florida, they would see all of the listing data, as well as all of the other content that relates to the area, like road closures or life jacket loaner programs.
“The idea is that once you get the entire ecosystem to contribute content,” he said. “This will be a very powerful tool for the industry to go by location, and find what they want and more.”
WikiRealty launched its free website in March, testing well in Naples, Florida, as well as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The site has gone live today for its Chicago location.
“We’ve only been live for three months but the impact has been pretty significant,” he said. “We haven’t done any marketing. We’ve been contacting real estate businesses to talk about WikiRealty. We’ve launched in our test locations, now we’re launching in two major metro’s, Chicago and Miami.”
Kuttemperoor added, “Everyone that we’ve talked to in Chicago, from builders to developers to agents, think it’s a great tool. It’s a free way to get their knowledge out about properties in Chicago. We want to be the trusted source for information for real estate, disseminating real time information.”
After launching in Chicago, WikiRealty will be launching in Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles over the next couple of months.
In the next three to five years, Kuttemperoor has a big vision for WikiRealty.
“I see us being a national platform for people searching for, what I call, hyper local knowledge, in any market. So people will be able to go on the site and type in anything like they would on Google. Local knowledge today is hard to get, so I see us as a national, if not international, platform because real estate is a global industry.”
