Posted originally on June 02 2006.
Look at the apartments in New York City! Check out http://www.urbanregistry.com, if you live in Manhattan or Brooklyn, or are looking to rent or buy a home in Gotham city. They’ve opened their doors to thousands of apartments and houses available for rent across the entire city. You know another good thing, there’s no service fee!
Ever searched for Housing or Apartments online? Well, I have searched for real estate and/or apartments in recent years – using Craigslist, Zillow, Trulia and such… but that’s now.
Way back, in 2006, Urban Registry was also in the same space (pun intended) i.e. in the domain of aggregated real estate search. We were building this vertical search engine, and in my role as Marketing Director, was looking for every which avenue to market our virtual product. Initially I had zero marketing $$$ at my disposal… but went ahead to create a page on Wikipedia with a ‘neutral pov’. (Soon after it was deleted.) Later, with just a $1,000 as my budget, I liaised with the Gothamist, Curbed.com, and many such New York centric online publications to figure out the how to for promoting our brand. Trulia, Redfin, Zillow, PropertyShark and a whole bunch of other sites were in the running.
I learned a bit about ‘aggregation’, and earned just enough to keep head above high water. I wrote copy for banner ads that would run sporadically on the online websites… measurement of the effectiveness of ads, hits, eyeballs, conversions, was hard to gauge. SEO was in its nascent stages (no matter what anyone will say). Before you knew it, in a blink, the princely thousand dollars had vanished in cyberspace. Zillow went public, then acquired Trulia, Redfin is around I believe… but Urban Registry… no marks for guessing about its whereabouts. My contract with them had ended. Oddly, what could have been a great brand in the real estate search space… became another me-too, a forgotten internet company in cyberspace. Why did they let it go, I’m still baffled! Did I post about lost kingdoms a short while back? Well, those who own parking garages and real estate in Manhattan needn’t to worry about loose change, eh? 😉
Words-n-Motion 