Crowdsourcing a New Home

Late this past Saturday afternoon, we had just returned from a family bike ride on a very pleasant day.  While I was putting the bikes away, a nice couple passed by and cheerfully said hello as they continued their stroll.  When they were almost past my house I could hear them talking amongst themselves.  Suddenly they turned and said, “Excuse us sir, but we are looking at buying a house up the street and we were just wondering if you like the neighborhood?”  They explained that they were not from the area so anything I could tell them would be helpful; we will call them Ted and Sue.  As someone who has been burned in a real estate transaction, I was more than happy to give Ted and Sue my opinion.

Although Ted and Sue had probably already made up their minds on purchasing this new home, polling a few people on the street most likely put their minds at ease.  The process Ted and Sue undertook in researching their new home was prudent albeit limited and time consuming.  They had looked at five or six homes that day and when they found one they liked they walked around the neighborhood to get a feel for the area.  Then, they saw someone who looked approachable and figured they would ask some questions.

In this process, Ted and Sue were reliant on the opinions of the few people that might have been outside in their yard at that exact time.  While our street and neighborhood is a great place to live, they could have easily ran into someone who just had a bad day and as a result might not have gotten a good understanding of the area.  Worse, there could have been no one outside at all and they would have gotten zero feedback.  In this case, Ted and Sue would have had to make a $900K purchase without any neighbor data points, which is how 99% of the country makes their decision on a new home today.  In reality, the intangibles of a neighborhood like culture, ages of the existing residents, daily traffic conditions all can make or break your desire to live there.  With the exclusion of the information from the buyer’s real estate agent, the process of buying a home is almost entirely in a vacuum. 

There are a few websites that do allow people to write reviews and ask questions.  The problem with this is that users are back to the same situation that Ted and Sue found themselves: reliant on the few who have taken the time to write something.  This does not come close to a crowdsourcing solution where the collective wisdom of the masses contributed.

The good news is that all of this data does exist, if only in our minds.  In the example of Ted and Sue, they were totally reliant on one opinion, which may or may not have been helpful or representative of the real environment.  What Ted and Sue really needed was to crowdsource this decision to see what 500 people thought about our neighborhood.  With this information they could then compare wisdom of crowds for our neighborhood against the same for the other neighborhoods they had been considering.  From there the individual opinions of the few chance encounters on the street could complete the picture for them as opposed to being the entire picture.   Just imagine the possibilities.

The Crowd is gathering……………