BlockAvenue.com, a new, local, online startup, is aiming to help people decide where to live by crowd-sourcing neighborhood reviews.
The site uses a combination of data sources combined with user commentary to generate letter grades for every single block in a city, allowing home-seekers to zoom in and scope out potential new neighborhoods.
The site was founded by Anthony Longo, founder of online brokerage CondoDomain, which was acquired by a large New Jersey brokerage earlier this year.
“This thing’s been brewing in my brain for the past year and half,” Longo told Banker & Tradesman. “People seem to be, myself included, really passionate about where they live … there’s a huge sense of pride in these hyper-local communities in people’s reviews, and they feel very strongly about it. [I’m hopeful] that that’s going to carry us an awful long way.”
The site launched two weeks ago and is now in the live beta testing phase. Though they’ve collected partial data for most of the country, for now the company is focusing on Boston, New York and Washington DC.
“The statistics of the people on the site [since launch] are pretty amazing – we had average visitors staying on the site for 15-plus minutes, and we had 400 searches a minute on the launch days, Longo said. “We have a long way to go, but I think we struck a chord.”
Information Starved
The new site is one real estate agents might want to keep a weather eye one, as the market that BlockAvenue is trying to corner – providing local neighborhood expertise – is one that agents have long considered their turf. But they shouldn’t be too worried, said Deb Agliano, an agent with RE/MAX Andrew Realty in Medford and an online marketing expert who advises other agents on how to improve their internet marketing.
“When Zillow first came out there were some agents who were [freaking out] saying, ‘oh, my god, we’re going to be inconsequential now because people can go online and find out, here’s what my house is worth,’” she explained. “But an algorithm can’t take the place of [an agent’s knowledge]. I don’t look at it as competition – I look at it as something that helps, because today’s buyer is so information-starved. They want to know everything. And they really do want to do a lot of research on their own.”
The backbone of the site is a huge database of block-by-block info on everything that affects city life, from crime to commutes. For example, when looking at transportation options, the company incorporated not only the to-be-expected-in-2012 bus stops, commuter rail stations and ferry docks, but also data like ZipCar locations and Hubway bike sites. Like many current real estate sites, the database includes the location of schools and parks, but also covers amenities like libraries and jogging paths, businesses including dry cleaners and restaurants, and incorporates block-by-block data on crime rates, including the addresses of registered sex offenders.
Longo said the company plans to rapidly evolve the weighting system of these different inputs over the coming weeks as users begin to get onto the site, in order to improve the ratings. In the future, he said they intend to allow people to set up profiles and alerts so residents can get immediate news about changes in their neighborhood.
“The big one where we need to excel as a company is the social layer that we put on our data,” said Longo. Right now, the site allows people to vote on whether a given business or amenity improves their neighborhood, and to comment on why, as well as to add more general reviews of the neighborhood.
Striking A Balance
Sites which provide hyper-local info have had mixed success in the past. While business-review sites like Yelp have flourished (despite problems with profitability), neighborhood-news centric sites like EveryBlock and AOL’s Patch network have struggled to attract advertisers. BlockAvenue combines some of the features of both.
Striking a balance between the two may offer some challenges. Already, Longo said he has noticed that in the flush of new reviews the site has attracted following its launch, people tend to leave broad, sweeping commentary on the livability of entire neighborhoods. The automated data the site churns through to generate grades tends makes big distinctions from one block to another.
“We’re seeing people write these four- and five-block-radius reviews that touch on lots of different categories,” he said. “Our mission as a company is to get those little hidden snippets on every datapoint on our site.”
There also the potential problem of interested parties attempting to skew the ratings, an issue that has caused controversy on other sites in the past that rely on reviews. For now, Longo said, they’re requiring users to register through Facebook in order to deter spammers. Long-term, the hope is that users will help police each other, raising objections to obviously false or inflated reviews that keep the grading system on track.
