People considering buying a condo will appreciate Condopedia, a new website modelled on Wikipedia that allows consumers to compare buildings using many different factors.
Vancouver-area realtor and Condopedia president Laurence Putnam is promoting the addition of Vancouver to the website. It was launched in April with New York City.
“What I see in the market now is MLS or Realtor.ca that are very good at giving you the factual details,” Putnam said Thurday in an interview. “What’s lacking s who built the building, or who the architect was. These things are important, or at minimum, at least interesting.”
The site would be a good place to start a search for a new home, but people should be sure to verify the information with a realtor before entering into a purchase, said Sandra Wyant, president of the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver.
“It seems extremely informative — it’s good to have that information all in one place,” Wyant said. “That looks like quite a comprehensive site.”
Putnam started with New York, but wanted to add Vancouver quickly because he thinks it is North America’s most competitive market.
For example, Putnam said, there is one real estate agent for every 520 people in New York. “Here, it’s 190 (people) to one (realtor), which is insane. But it speaks to how obsessed the city is with real estate, and I’m no different,” Putnam said. “I think our market is uniquely interesting in a number of respects, from the pitfalls of our leaky condo past to many of the upsides.”
Condopedia has also just added sections for Los Angeles and Chicago, although they are incomplete and will be added to over the coming months, Putnam said.
Condopedia has about 15 writers working on adding buildings to the site, which has information about 527 buildings; 105 of those are in Vancouver. In addition, anyone can create an account, log in, and edit the site, just as on Wikipedia, Putnam said.
Revenues will come from advertising, Putnam said. For example, realtors can purchase ads linked to a specific building’s webpage on Condopedia. The cost will be determined by the number of suites in the building, based on 75 cents per unit per month on a 12-month contract, Putnam said.
Along with general information, each building’s page has various subheadings including background, construction, layout, floor plans, amenities and trivia.
“In the trivia section we will put things like if a film star lived there or if there was a movie filmed there, or even if there was a murder there,” Putnam said.
There will be a comments section, where people can provide their own reviews buildings, similar to Consumer Reports for cars, or Trip Advisor for hotels, Putnam said.
“That’s part of the debate and part of the fun,” Putnam said. “I think for today’s tech-savvy buyer who is trying to do their due diligence on a building, ... we want to be that source of background information where people can compare peer-to-peer.”
Strata council minutes will not be available on the site, due to privacy concerns, Putnam said, adding that the site is not intended to replace the function of realtors, but is intended to provide information that isn’t easily available.
The site has the very familiar clean and simple look of Wikipedia, but has no financial ties to the online encyclopedia.
“Wikipedia freely licences the media wiki software platform that we use,” Putnam said. “The give and take of it is that as we use it to do what we’re doing, we might discover a code that helps us, and we would freely licence that code back to the open source community for the use of Wikipedia.”
Putnam said there have been no problems so far with keeping the information objective, but that the bigger the site grows, the more challenging that will become.
“We see the updates come in. If someone comes on to change a page, we can see what that change is. As the change appears to be genuine, and not born out of malice, we will leave it alone,” Putnam said. “If it were to clearly be vandalism, malice or sour grapes, there are a number of actions we can take. We can block your IP address.”
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