RentWiki - The Yelp for Neighborhoods
January 19, 2009 – 5:49 pm
RentWiki is now live.
If you are familiar with Yelp, RentWiki is very similar but for neighborhoods. “RentWiki is peer recommendations on where to live.” says Eric Wu, Founder of RentWiki. “Our hope and vision is to provide the content that will help renters identify the right area for their lifestyle.”
I gave RentWiki a test run and for specific city searches I am really impressed. For some of the top cities in the United States they have robust content on neighborhoods and anyone with a RentWiki account can add to and edit information for a specific area.
As with any content that is developed by a group of people, it may take some time to reach critical mass and scale into more cities. However, with time, I see RentWiki becoming a great tool to find a new place to live, research neighborhoods and rate communities.
3 Responses to “RentWiki - The Yelp for Neighborhoods”
Nice work Eric, the site looks really nice.
I need to get working on my new site pickrent.com, I am almost done with my hosting issues.
By Dave Dugdale on Jan 19, 2009
The idea of a “RentWiki” is nice and I think this would definitely fill a need in the online rental space.
However. The whole point of a Wiki is that users add content because they have a vested interested in improving the site. Wiki’s are often setup around a common community, whether it be a software API, a college sports team or a specific city. The people who add content to the wiki have some sort of relationship to the topic. For example, people who add content to a college sports team might be fans of that team, or go to the college.
Who is the community around a RentWiki? People who use rental websites do not return and visit the site after they find an apartment. The only possible users I see that would contribute to this Wiki are real estate agents who rent apartments. I question how much effort real estate agents are going to invest into rentals. Additionally there are sites like ActiveRain that already do something similar and have a huge following of real estate agents.
Where does that leave RentWiki? They need to find a way to get users to engage the site or they need to enter the information themselves.
The site does look good and works well. I hope they do well.
By Jerry on Jan 21, 2009
Hi Jerry,
Thank you for your feedback and you bring up a great point. Though one of our focuses is to build a community, there several factors that drive a user to contribute content.
For RentWiki.com, our hypothesis is that people are passionate about their neighborhoods and where they live. Whether it is to help renters, express an opinion, or show their knowledge, we’ve seen a great response in people’s willingness to contribute content about their neighborhood. In the case of TripAdvisor, where a user will not likely retake the trip, they are willing to give advice and reviews on their experience.
You are right. Our biggest difficulty will come in engaging users to share their experience and advice of moving to the area. As we grow and reach out to evangelists these first few months after launch, I am excited to see if people will continue to be engaged once the “new” website push wears off.
Any more feedback, drop me a line!
Eric C. Wu
eric@rentwiki.com
By Eric Wu on Jan 21, 2009