Hyperlocal real estate comes to the iPhone

CO Everywhere will pull in content from 1,000+ sources including Trulia, Zillow

From left: Stephen Kliegerman, a screenshot of CO Everywhere and Tony Longo
From left: Stephen Kliegerman, a screenshot of CO Everywhere and Tony Longo

The founder of web-based real estate broker CondoDomain is launching a free iPhone app today that connects mobile users with a wealth of neighborhood information from big data and social media.

Tony Longo, in an exclusive interview, gave The Real Deal a sneak peak of what he is calling CO Everywhere. The app can be downloaded now from the App Store and plans are in the works to make it available on Android phones. CO Everywhere lets users create a real-time hyperlocal news feed based on more than 1,000 sources — including Facebook posts, Instagram photos, Groupon deals, Eventbrite events and Yelp reviews — and pulls in real-estate specific data from websites such as Trulia and Zillow.

“You get to see what’s really happening in the block,” Longo said. “We will give you the ultimate experience by pooling in every social event.”

CO Everywhere is the next iteration of Longo’s BlockAvenue, which assigns a letter grade to every 300-square-foot space in the country based on publicly available and crowdsourced information about parks, restaurants, pubs, schools, transit stops, crime and other lifestyle indicators, as The Real Deal reported.

“We took our data hats off and put on our regular baseball caps,” Longo said. “The content that’s being produced in these two-block neighborhoods is really freakin’ interesting!”

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

The venture expects to generate revenue from deals and discounts, with a focus on the hyperlocal level “where there’s very little competition currently,” Longo said.

So far, Longo has received about $1 million in funding from investors including Semyon Dukach, a blackjack ace whose exploits were chronicled in the bestseller novel “Bringing Down the House,” and Stephen Kliegerman, the president of Terra Development Marketing, which oversees sales and marketing of new developments for Halstead Property and Brown Harris Stevens. Kliegerman invested in CO Everywhere on his own and the brokerages have no ties with the venture.

“People could utilize it to get to know neighborhoods without fluff of editorial,” Kliegerman told The Real Deal, adding that there could be valuable implications for the real estate community.

“Developers, especially if they’re working on an up-and-coming neighborhood,” can use the app to get detailed information about the neighborhood’s character and what residents are looking for, he said.

Brokers also could build their cachet by providing neighborhood-specific expertise through the app, he added.