New Informational Site about Central American Real Estate
Feb 15th, 2009 by Kevin
Recently I came across an article in Nuwire about a new Real Estate Investment site for Central America called RevealRealEstate.com. According to the article the content is managed by a set of former brokers who have worked in the region and after seeing the difficulty of finding reliable information built this application.
I decided to sign up and see what it had to offer. Sticking with Web 2.0 style they slapped a ‘beta’ in the title, which seems a little passe now, the site appears to be off to a good start in terms of content. I reviewed the Nicaragua content and it was good. I added a link to this site in our offshore investment section of this blog for future reference. Nothing out of the ordinary in terms of content, but I do like the way they are using graphs to help investors make comparisons. Here are a couple of interesting examples from the site (first isn’t labelled but it is a property price/sq ft over a 3 month period in mid 2008):
If they can keep the content new and fresh, I think they should do very well. There is definitely a need for this type of data aggregation, however I don’t think there is near the depth required to make informed decisions about a future investment yet. However no investor should rely on only once source of data, so this can definitely become yet another tool in ones tool-belt for analysis.
As for the Nuwire comment implying that this site is in the Web2.0 category, it has some work remaining in this regard. After signing up and setting up a very sparse profile, I didn’t really see any tools that would allow me to connect and converse with others in the community or even see who was in the community. No blogging, forums, friend networks etc, so after joining and browsing I felt pretty alone in the site. Granted I could write a review, but it still felt very centralized and focused on one way communication, but in the real estate space I can understand their hesitation. Opening the social tool flood gates could turn what is starting out as a well run site, into a spam playground for sleazy land owners trying to hawk property to anyone that will listen.
Overall I think its a great start and encourage others interested in central American investment to join. With more users the network effect will enhance the overall experience in a positive way for everyone.
