Website hopes to be Wikipedia for NYC apartments

Condopedia.com, a new open-source website that allows anyone to edit its content, is aiming to give real estate watchers the opportunity to share their experiences about their favorite (or least favorite) apartment buildings, Crain’s reported.

The site is similar to Wikipedia and Yelp except that it focuses exclusively on real estate. After registering, users can post their thoughts, opinions and even pictures of apartment buildings that they want to review.

“It’s about creating an open-ended, peer-to-peer community where residents and neighbors can talk about buildings, rather than just the brokers and the developers,” said the site’s founder, Laurence Putnam. “These buildings have so much history, so much detail and that can get lost.”

Putnam is a real estate broker in Vancouver, Canada, and although the site will feature buildings in a few cities, New York City will be the main focus. For Putnam, focusing on New York was an obvious decision.

“Just in terms of sheer number of apartments and buildings, it’s by far the biggest market in North America,” he said.

The site launched in March and it hopes to begin turning a profit by selling banner ads to brokers. Although it does have floor plans and amenities posted, Putnam is adamant that Condopedia is not just another listings site.

“Real estate touches everybody,” he said. “We all live somewhere, we all know what’s going on where we live, to some degree, and the more that information is shared and available, the more stories we can tell about these buildings, it helps the market.” [Crain’s] —Evan Bleier