We’ve launched, again!
Since our early release back in December of last year, our mission has been to open up the real estate industry and empower consumers. We were frustrated - like many of you are - by the fact that so much of the real estate information we wanted was either restricted, entirely unavailable, or fragmented all across the web. And we felt that this was disempowering consumers.
We asked ourselves questions such as: Why can’t I get instantly notified when a property two blocks away from me sells so that I can keep tabs on the value of my investment? In a real estate market as active as Toronto’s, why isn’t there an easy way for me to track new development activity happening around me? And frankly, why does it cost so much for me to sell a property?
We founded Dirt to solve problems just like these. We imagined a real estate industry that was open to all, transparent and hyper connected in ways that we’ve now all become accustomed to. Similar to how Facebook has made the world more “open and connected” and LinkedIn has helped us to become “more productive and successful”, Dirt’s mission is simple: to open up the real estate industry and empower you - the consumer.
We have a lot of great ideas for how we plan to achieve this and when we launched back in December we were exploring some of them with a small group of our friends, colleagues, and other Toronto residents. The experience was invaluable. We quickly learned that most of you share our pains about the real estate industry and just as many of you are clamoring for change. More specifically, you told us some of the things you’d like to see on Dirt.
Today, we couldn’t be more proud to be announcing the first full public launch of Dirt. It incorporates a lot of the feedback we received from our early users and makes it significantly easier for anyone to share information about Toronto properties and the market in general.
At the core of the Dirt philosophy is the belief that the democratization of real estate information will make us all better off. That is, if everyone simply pooled what they knew about properties and the real estate market (the technical term is crowdsourcing), we’d all have access to tons of hugely valuable information that all of us could then use to make better real estate decisions. Crowdsourcing is the same technique used on sites such as Wikipedia and Kickstarter.
So what exactly have we done?
First of all, we’ve made it so that anyone can join the Dirt community - even if you don’t own a property. Simply signup here. We thought this was really important in order to create the kind of openness, transparency and connectedness we’re after. We want Dirt to be the number one resource for prospective buyers and property enthusiasts who want to research the market.
Secondly, we’ve created what we think are a first for the industry: profiles for properties. A Dirt property profile is your property’s free, beautiful and consolidated home on the web. It’s a place where you can share photos, add details about your property, provide updates on your new renovation, and engage directly with other member of the Dirt community. Want to know what the market thinks about your newly renovated kitchen? Ask them.
You’ll also be able to determine what the market thinks your property is worth. We call this a crowd valuation and it involves members of the Dirt community “appraising” your property. How it works is simple: We take the opinions of a large group of people and then we aggregate them, removing any clear outliers. We’ve been testing this over the past few months and the values we receive are remarkably accurate. It’s a great way for you to gauge market sentiment.
Finally, to help owners share their property profiles with family & friends and prospective buyers & renters, you’ll also get your own unique and permanent URL:
thedirt.co/toronto/number-street-type
(for example: thedirt.co/toronto/1-market-street)
To learn more about why we think property profiles are going to change the industry, check out last week’s blog post.
We’re thrilled to be announcing these new features and we think they’ll really improve the way real estate consumers share information about properties and the market. More significantly though, we see property profiles as a shift in the way we all think about real estate. Today, owners only list or create profiles for their properties when they’re looking to sell or rent, and then they disappear. Dirt property profiles are permanent and allow owners to paint a much fuller picture of the history of their properties.
Think about it from the perspective of a prospective buyer about to make what is likely the biggest purchase of his/her life. Don’t you think they’d want to know as much as possible about what they’re about to buy? We’ve already seen similar shifts take place in other industries, such as recruitment. LinkedIn got us to create professional profiles for ourselves even when we weren’t looking for a job!
But we’re not stopping here. We’re already hard at work on adding even more features to Dirt that will help empower consumers. Over the coming weeks we’ll be allowing non-owners to add properties to the Dirt community. This could include renters, agents representing owners, or people who just love real estate as much as we do. We’ll also be creating building profiles. These will work as a kind of a micro-community within Dirt, allowing property profiles within the same condo building to be grouped, and residents in the same building to engage with each other.
If there’s anything else you’d like to see on Dirt, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] or tweet us @thedirtco. To get started with a property profile on Dirt or to just browse properties in Toronto, click here. We hope that you have as much fun using Dirt as we’re having creating it.