A new entry in Charlottesville real estate search

This site popped up today in one of my saved blog searches – Curbplaces. Their blog announced their “going live” today.

From their site:

Curbplaces is a real estate data website, built for Charlottesville, VA. All data is taken from publicly available websites and databases.

Curbplaces is a project of Cloudbrain, LLC, a web development firm based in Charlottesville. This project is a work-in-progress, so please be kind as we continue to improve the website. We would love to hear any suggestions you may have.

As of yet, I haven’t figured out from where they are pulling their data, but they seem to be affiliated with House Values.  They are competing in a tough field filling up fast.  Zillow, Cyberhomes, Propsmart, Realestateabc, etc. … More to come …

Update 5/8/2007: Having played with it some more, I have yet to find how to zoom in/zoom out. Curbplaces is intriguing, if only because they are a local startup, running WordPress.

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5 Comments

  1. Daniel May 8, 2007 at 11:45

    Jim –

    Thanks for the highlight. I didn’t realize Technorati was crawling our website already. We didn’t expect anyone besides friends to notice the site so quickly.

    To answer your questions:

    We (Cloudbrain.com) launched Curbplaces.com last week. It has been under development for several months. The data comes from crawling local city and county online records databases (for assessment data) and local real estate websites and Google searches for “For Sale” data. The server works similar to Google – it crawls around the Internet looking for data and then aggregates that data into a single entry for a property. We cache the data on our own server to speed things up and to run comparisons, but the server is continually looking for new data.

    We are not affiliated with any other websites or companies (I’m not sure why you thought we worked with HouseValues.com). The real estate search website field is getting crowded, but, as far as we can tell, CurbPlaces.com has by far the most data on the Charlottesville / Albemarle area. A major reason we decided to build this site was because Charlottesville was being overlooked by the big players (i.e. Trillow.com).

    As far as plans – right now our focus is on building an easy-to-use and powerful website that will be fun and useful for the Charlottesville community. There are several additional features under development (to be released in the next week or) that will add tools for both FSBOs and agents as well as an advertising engine. The real plan is to build a good website and watch where it takes us.

    In response to your email, we’ve made a few changes to the website including a zoom tool and fixed spelling errors (thanks!). I’d love to hear any more thoughts you (or any of your readers) have on the site.

    Daniel

  2. Jim Duncan May 8, 2007 at 14:22

    Daniel –

    I must have misread something on your site and mistakenly thought you were associated with HouseValues. That is fixed.

    I look forward to watching your site develop and evolve.

  3. Daniel May 8, 2007 at 15:32

    No problem. Maybe we need to come up with a different name than “House Value Report”.

    Also, regarding WordPress – We use it to power the Cloudbrain.com website, which is just a blog about our different products and a few “corporate” information pages. CurbPlaces.com and the other websites are all custom-built code. Just in case there was an confusion.

  4. Erin May 9, 2007 at 21:46

    Interesting site — since, as you pointed out, this isn’t a new concept on the Web, it’s smart of them to try and make a niche by focusing on one city.