-rsh

We appreciate your invitation for us to chime in, and hope the below helps further explain REonomy’s place in the real estate information world and the purpose of its unique tools.

For the RE Professional
• REonomy is a B2B property research service, and every piece of data, research tool, and service component of REonomy.com was designed for the real estate professional. There are some great B2C sites out there, such as Trulia, Zillow and others, and they are targeting a different user set.

• You mention many great companies in your post. Our systems are very different, and we do not intend to compete with many of these services. While Argus is used for large deals that make up a fraction of real estate transactions, REonomy provides detailed income and expense reports and useful information to peek client or investor interest, as well as for smaller acquisitions, at a fraction of the price. REonomy’s mapping software is different from that of ArcView and MapInfo in that REonomy has all its information integrated and will automatically update as often as possible, and does not require any work from the user. As with all REonomy tools, our mapping system is very simple to use.

Social Network
• REonomy’s “social network” is not a traditional social networking platform. The format of our business network and the information we allow real estate professionals to provide can be more closely compared to a very detailed virtual business card that keeps everyone updated on what you are working on in case of potential interest. While social networks often require multiple daily or weekly posts, REonomy’s tool is not something that would not necessarily need to be updated even a handful of times per year.

3-D Bulk-Study Renderings
• Our 3D Bulk Study Renderings are generated on demand and are not designed to replace an architect or a team of people by any means! In fact, some projects you mentioned, such as large office buildings, are overbuilt assemblage projects that would not use REonomy to gauge the potential of any property. Instead, our tool is useful for investors or brokers who are trying to quickly see what a property could be turned into. It is precisely this type of tool, showing a client a visual of what he could be buying, that could close the deal for a broker. There are also many under-built buildings in NYC, and this tool can identify them for the user and is terrific for any initial research that would ultimately require you to do analysis on multiple buildings whereas here you just click on the properties.

MLS
• REonomy’s MLS will not be competing with established MLSs around the country. The real benefit of our MLS is that it is free to post listings on REonomy, and the individual who posts the listings can choose who to make these listings available to within the REonomy network. A user has the option of to create off-market listings and opt into those he/she would like to share them with. When a user views a listing on REonomy, as you can see in the tour, the listing information is displayed alongside a full property report. All information can be found in one place. Crosspollination of information adds additional value.

Microsites
• REonomy employed an SEO specialist to develop the user-friendly Microsite platforms for real estate professionals. This platform is index-able by search engines so that leads may be gathered at no cost to the user. Listings are automatically pulled from the system and displayed in a way conducive to lead-generation. For commercial and residential brokers alike, bringing in the client gets a larger percentage of the sale.

REonomy’s all-inclusive platform is designed to show people in many facets of the industry how to use information some of them do not ordinarily use and create tools to benefit their business.

Residential brokers can use REonomy to provide better information to their clients and ultimately save time. REonomy provides more information about buildings, such as how many apartments are in it (I like to live in small buildings), incomparable photos of a building and neighborhood, and pictures of the views. Our imagery is the same imagery that ameliorated an issue for an early beta-user: This user worked at a mid-sized private equity group and after doing his due diligence, the final obstacle was an issue with how the penthouse of a mixed-use building sat on the roof. They could not determine this from the street, nor get into the penthouse. After two minutes on our maps, he had his answer.

Using REonomy as both a property data, research and service provider allows users to consolidate their service providers and significantly reduce overhead; the most expensive subscription we offer is currently $560 per year.

We are also far from complete. REonomy is a living, evolving system, we have a lot in the pipeline, and you will see many new features from us in the future. We have and will continue to create tools that automatically analyze properties and numbers to help the real estate professional. We take requests from our clients to better serve them, and we are already developing new tools based on their feedback.

We welcome you to register for a free trial (http://www.reonomy.com/Register.aspx), play around with the site more, and let us know what you think as you use the site in the coming weeks!

Thanks again,

Charles Oshman
Co-founder & Partner
REonomy.com: The Knowledge of Real Estate

Check-out wwww.BestHomePro.com. Search in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill NC area. (Also in other markets and growing.)

I think the emerging markets would do very well to focus heavily on data collection. Even as I’m leery of government intervention in the economy, I fully support almost all data-collection and data-distribution services that the government does. Census data, business data, labor data, financial data — so much of this stuff is critical to capitalism, but profits are hard to come by.

Buy the UI from REonomy or any of the other real estate tech companies, but focus on data collection. That will be the key.

-rsh