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My-Currency is another jab at bringing the agent controlled real-estate world into the social domain. Unlike the algorithmic approach of Zillow, users in control at My-Currency and are open have their say in the price of an open property with their predicted value. My-Currency wants the service to be much more than just a guessing and estimation platform. What they really want to provide for is – People establishing their online reputation through contributions to the community, by sharing their expertise, and building a social network. Answers, Wikis, blogs are just few of the tools built into the site to enable such collaboration and information sharing. Taken at a community level, as a user, you can easily tell whose judgment you can trust.
Right now My-Currency has 2 sides to it. People can search by housing or by indexes. Search by housing is typical – Zip, Price, Beds, Bath…..Different part is, for each house you get know to know what value people are associating with it, get a pricing trend, and research around it on wikis and blogs. If you want to operate on a broader scale, by choosing indexes in the search, you can get results for median square foot values for any particular zip code. Again you have access to the same set of tools to collaborate and discuss with the community members. As for the data, people bring in the leads for new properties which are up for sale in the market. Idea is better compared to MLS listings ’cause people or agents can add and update the status faster since they have the first hand information.
As I discussed with Karim Tahawi, co-founder of My-Currency, discussions around housing as compared to indexes will get too micro-focused. I guess, even by conservative estimates any house which is in the market up for sale today might not be back for sale before another 4-5 years. This means any discussions around a particular house would not be relevant for a longer term of time and might be used more from a historical analysis perspective. Also selling/buying an house is one of the biggest transaction most of us will ever do. So, most of the My-Currency traffic might be from one-time users some of whom might never really return after they buy their house. Take the case of Edmunds Car Forums, which I had discussed before. Only time people log back into Edmunds Forum is when they are looking for a new car, which happens maybe every 2-3 years for a larger percentage of people. Community is pretty responsive, and you have some great information flowing through all the time, which keep the forums very effective to use.
Having said that, My-Currency will soon be introducing similar platforms for money management, politics…..– Most of the verticals which have failed get the community effect rolling and need effective spread of valuable information and insights faster. In some respect, My-Currency wants to be a Wikipedia for many verticals, with the big difference of being able to tell the power users who drive in useful information. Still, building the 2 way street, where a user gives up valuable information in return for the same, is always difficult. Would be interesting to see how My-Currency goes about doing that.
Links:
My-Currency
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