The weekend of the 20th and 22nd of November 40 entrepreneurs got together in Mexico Distrito Federal to create a mexican StartUp. This event is called iWeekend.
What is relevant to the real estate industry is that the proyect is a location based services mapping website called Mapatlan and it has the idea of bringing together day to day stories of a city with the most significant places and corners of the place.
Mapatlan.com - iWeekend Mexico DF
In their own words:
Give life to places by telling the stories of the people.
This is what the entrepreneur and his team are setting up, by spreading the word about what is taking places in the city. So it does not stay on the imagination of the citizens but on the popular culture of the Internet. The concept is to identify on a map the different stories of persons relating to a location, tagging it with a date.
Location based services like FourSquare and Yelp have seen an increase of their use by realtors and professionals in the Internet real estate sector. I think that there is a great opportunity for commercialization of real estate as an addon service, but also to interact with local buyers in their area.
An example: A person that is trying to find real estate near the international border in México and USA, could visualize which recent stories have been published near the property he is interested in renting or buying. Therefore we give the interested party a chance to get more information so he or she can make a decision, by crowdsourcing the local citizens that live by the location.
Many people will be exceptical about the benefits of this service ounce their location has been tagged with “bad reputation”, but this can be used so local authorities can do something about the problem that many citizens have expressed in their stories. This happened in Barcelona, where one of the most popular streets was filled with prostitutes and with the help of traditional and new media the local goverment reacted promtly to take them out of the streets, so neighbours could enjoy their streets.
We will pay close attention to this project and its evolution, because we know that this type of services are in much need in Mexico, so everybody can know what the population thinks of the places they live close by. Real estate professionals should be using localtion based applications to enhance their communication with local buyers and sellers of homes, but also commercial properties. The influence they will have in real estate transactions will be very important in the not so distintant future.