A real estate broker with a background in apartment rentals wants to take the city’s rental inventory into the 21st century.
Jeff Mayer, founder of the industry group and Internet listings database that will be called Real Estate Professionals of New York, or Repny, hopes to get his project off the ground by June 1 when he launches his Web site, Repny.com.
Mayer, working with partner Judah Gestetner, said he is creating a managed Web database offering a directory of rentals and sales listings in New York City, as well as professional listings, such as city appraisers and engineers.
Mayer said he envisions Repny as a network of real estate professionals assisting others in the industry. “There’s really nothing else on the market like this,” Mayer said. “There’s nothing to help someone who wants to get into the real estate business — to understand how commercial mortgages work, for instance, or residential mortgages.”
As far as listings, Repny.com will maintain five databases: apartments for rent, apartments for sale, commercial sales, commercial rentals, and new developments. While Repny.com will not charge for listings submitted by real estate brokers and landlords, relying instead on advertisers to cover costs, it will require them to register at the site and brokers to provide a copy of their license. Mayer said he may operate Repny as a nonprofit.
Repny.com will be very different from classified listings giant Craigslist and its competitor Windows Live Expo at expo.live.com, a similar service launched at the end of February by Microsoft, Mayer said. “For Craigslist, anyone can go to the site and post whatever they want whenever they want,” he said. “This database is going to be managed.”
Repny.com aims to knock out a lot of the duplication of listings seen in some Web site listing services. “At Nytimes.com, they’re listing 3,800 apartments available in the West Village, and actually, you can’t find three,” Mayer said. “It’s ridiculous to do a search, because you end up with thousands of apartments. If you’re a landlord putting in one ad, your ad’s going to get lost. Real estate agents will be limited to posting two listings a day, he said.
“If you have an exclusive, you can post it,” he said. “We just want to see there’s an exclusive on it. We don’t want people in New York City running around in circles when there’s nothing there.”
Mayer said a focus is attracting landlords from the five boroughs to post their listings for free in the rental apartment database. Every landlord who maintains listings on the Repny.com site will receive his or her own Web site linked to and updated along with the Repny. com site.
He said 280 landlords were on board as of April. As for the database’s name, Mayer said he can’t see the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) taking offense at the similarity. He may be right.
“I guess it’s a compliment that they’re calling themselves Repny,” said REBNY president Steven Spinola. “We’ll ask our people to take a look at it to see whether or not it’s appropriate, but anybody can put any listing together.”
Mayer, whose family is in real estate, said he decided to create Repny from the ashes of an apartment information vendor business he purchased 18 months ago, called Gotham City Apartments. After a few months running that business, which charged money up front for a list of available apartments, Mayer said he realized he got taken.
“I realized the business of charging people up front for a list can’t work,” he said. “People don’t end up finding an apartment.”
Mayer closed the business and decided to restructure it. “I thought, ‘There’s definitely a business here,'” he said. “And so I tweaked it where, instead of charging people for the list, we give it for free, and we charge the advertisers to maintain the list.”