Real Estate Gets Dedicated Wikipedia with Launch of Realestatewiki.com

By Anuradha Kher, Online News EditorAlisa Viejo, Calif.–The real estate industry just got its own Wikipedia. Realestatewiki.com, a privately funded, non-profit, non-bias venture similar to Wikipedia, and founded by a group of 12 real estate professionals, provides a free real estate encyclopedia and resource for everyone to use.Stefan Swanepoel, co-founder of realestatewiki.com, tells MHN, “Many of us were frustrated with the fact that there is a lack of information on real estate available online. We all know it’s there, so we decided to consolidate it.”In addition to the 7000 entries added by the founding members, the Web site has produced—through voluntary contributions—3,000 definitions, 1,000 answers to frequently asked questions about home buying, selling and financing, more than 500 acronyms, over 400 bios of real estate leaders and authors, a list of more than 600 real estate brokerage companies and over 800 real estate associations, institutes, councils, designations, courses, blogs, social networks and publications.“Our objective is to provide neutral, objective information on the subject. We edit all the material submitted to us and make it free of marketing type or negative language,” Swanepoel tells MHN.An estimated 10 million people work in the real estate industry (construction, brokerage, financial, insurance, appraisal, etc.) and real estate is the number one search topic on Google, according to realestatewiki.comSince its beta launch in January this year, realestatewiki.com has added 3,000 new entries in categories such as “Who’s Who in Real Estate,” “Real Estate Newspapers and Research,” “Real Estate Training Schools” and “Real Estate Brokerage Companies.”Realestatewiki regularly gets requests from people in the real estate industry, who want to contribute to the Web site.