Informed Real-Estate Services: Leveraging Web 2.0

Given the economic regression and the current estimations for high risk Real Estate (RE) investment opportunities in Greece, successful RE business must be very asset specific and make use of advanced, evidence-based decision making. Location-based context - along with the property characteristics - is recognized as a critical success factor for strategic business decisions. Existing electronic services (e-services) and applications are targeting purchasing or rental advertisement of properties based exclusively on their intrinsic characteristics, without offering any assistance to professional or individual retailers in assessing the positive (proximity to playgrounds, schools, dynamic local cultural relations, stimulating social interactions, etc.) or negative (air and noise pollution, traffic congestion, high criminality rates, etc.) location-related externalities of a particular property. Moreover, although valuable user added information relevant to the location or social context of a property is available in various Web 2.0 sources (in the form of Points of Interest, social annotations/posts, maps, etc.), advanced real estate business models and innovative e-services are still in their infancy. RealEstate2.0 aims to bridge this gap by delivering: