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YourStreet, a service that has just launched, will be bringing a social network to your street. The service empowers homeowners, buyers, sellers and renters to learn and share inside knowledge about their local neighbourhoods. The service is really similar to Australian based StreetAdvisor that launched in March. At the moment I do not see much of a difference between the StreetAdvisor and YourStreet, but that might change in coming days and months.
YourStreet employs a variety of social networking tools to facilitate and encourage conversations between the local residents. The user generated Market Monitor charts tracks the neighborhood´s real estate market. Visitors to the site rate their local markets on a scale of 0 to 10 and these votes are averaged together to produce a continually updated chart of consumer opinion for each neighborhood. This will place YourStreet on a collision course with Zillow, which also provides users with real estate valuations. YourStreet also provides users with Wikis and forums to share in depth information and analysis about the locality. Users could also share photos of the locality to provide a visual snapshot of the neighborhood.
YourStreet.com launches in five metro areas: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Phoenix. Within these five areas, YourStreet.com provides detailed information on more than 175 neighborhoods and towns. The site will soon expand into Boston, Chicago, Miami, San Diego and Dallas, and will cover the top 50 metro areas by the end of the year.
The company is founded by James Nicholson, who was formerly founder and CEO of NetVentures, an e-commerce software company that was bought by CNET in 1999. Spencer Liu, former Creative Director for CNET and Paul Rush, the Project Manager for Sony Music´s Connect download service are also part of the team.
With the new rush of services and social networks in the real estate domain, services like Realtor are so dead now.
