RealSure, a company that offers real estate consulting and publishing services, today announced the launch of the latest real estate wiki, or industry-focused user-generated encyclopedia, at RealEstateWiki.com.
The new site, launched in beta in January, features abut 3,000 definitions for real estate terms, about 1,000 answers to frequently asked questions, about 400 biography pages for industry luminaries, and a list of about 500 real estate acronyms, among other resources, according to the announcement.
Real estate research, real estate brokerage companies and real estate technology providers are among the 70 categories at the RealEstateWiki.com site.
BiggerPockets, an online real estate community, announced the launch of the first real estate wiki in November 2006, and real estate valuation and marketing site Zillow.com followed with the launch of its Real Estate Wiki in December 2006. Inman News rolled out its real estate wiki at InmanWiki.com in February 2007.
BiggerPockets shut its wiki down in May, citing a lack of resources to build and maintain the site. In the Hawaiian language, "wiki" means fast. Ward Cunningham, who developed the first wiki software in 1994, called WikiWikiWeb, adopted that name from a bus service in Hawaii called the Wiki Wiki Shuttle.
Stefan J.M. Swanepoel, a real estate author and lecturer who is a partner with RealSure and CEO of Realty U Group, a real estate education and training company, stated in a blog post, "A group of us … decided that we would like to create a freestanding real estate wiki for the industry similar to Wikipedia," which is the largest user-built online encyclopedia site.
While Wikipedia is the largest online general encyclopedia, other specialized wikis have cropped on the Web to provide more in-depth information for a given subject area.
In his February blog post, Swanepoel announced that constructing the new wiki will be "a constant work in progress and will need the involvement of a group of many more dedicated real estate professionals." He put out a call for bloggers, blog readers and technology enthusiasts to participate in the new wiki site. According to today’s announcement, there are an estimated 10 million people working in the real estate industry.
***
Send tips or a Letter to the Editor to glenn@inman.com, or call (510) 658-9252, ext. 137.
