

Evaluate My Real Estate Feedback Project - jcartano
http://reyalitor.com/

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JayNeely
Questions / Feedback:

* Who's the target audience for this?

* Why are you launching in eight cities when you don't have critical mass in one or two yet?

* Bright lime green: why!?

* Street addresses don't make for very interesting / differentiated headlines. Have you thought about alternatives? Can you require a picture with submission that you can thumbnail?

I think the main piece of UGC that would really add value to listings are
tags. Not for stuff that's already captured in the listing data, like "1 bed",
"2 bath", etc. but for more subjective ratings. del.icio.us-like shading of
tags to show how many people had tagged a listing with certain qualities would
be awesome.

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jcartano
* Who's the target audience for this?

The target audience for this is people that want to evaluate the value of an
MLS listing. For instance, I see a listing I am interested in on
Redfin/Trulia/Zillow, and search for it at Reyalitor. In the comments I can
see that somebody has visited the house and it really does not have 3
bedrooms, or there is mold, or in their opinion it is overpriced. Or positive
feedback such as a nice view or a good floorplan. My friends and I discuss
houses we see online but there is not a good medium to share this information
online.

* Why are you launching in eight cities when you don't have critical mass in one or two yet?

Honestly this is random, but I could scale back to Seattle for now.

* Bright lime green: why!?

I need to get some css skills

* Street addresses don't make for very interesting / differentiated headlines. Have you thought about alternatives? Can you require a picture with submission that you can thumbnail?

I have thought about a picture or being able to get a screen grab using ajax.
It might get tricky to require a picture since this would result in copy
pasting content from other websites. I'll investigate

I think the main piece of UGC that would really add value to listings are
tags. Not for stuff that's already captured in the listing data, like "1 bed",
"2 bath", etc. but for more subjective ratings. del.icio.us-like shading of
tags to show how many people had tagged a listing with certain qualities would
be awesome.

That sounds like an interesting feature. I will look into it.

Thanks for the great feedback!

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jcartano
I started this website as a personal project to learn more about ASP.NET MVC.
Now that the site is almost fully functional, I actually think it could be
pretty useful as a forum to discuss real estate listings. I know major listing
sites will not allow user generated content for listings for legal reasons so
this could fill that gap. I would love to get feedback and constructive
criticism as well as ideas to make the site more useful.

Thanks, Joe Cartano

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diN0bot
</p>

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hotpockets
Interesting idea (as well as color scheme). I think though that there are too
many houses on the market and too few people using your site. Focusing in one
place would be good. Personally I would choose detroit, at least you then have
a story to tell, you're trying to help out the country. Real-estate startup in
seattle? Boring. What story is there about seattle real estate? People love a
train wreck (Detroit), and you can leech off those eyeballs.

~~~
jcartano
That is great advice, it is very easy to add locations so I could add some
other locations to the mix without much trouble. I started with Seattle since
I personally follow the listings there. I'll strongly consider narrowing the
focus of the site and work on a decent color scheme as well :) Thanks

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vivekamn
For ny site based on user feedback, solving the chicken and egg problem is
going to be your biggest hurdle. Can you bootstrap the initial reviews from
some other source?

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tzetzefly
Perhaps this is what you were looking for? <http://dwellicious.com>

