Hi Everybody!
We’re Romio, and this is our blog. We’ve wanted to start a blog for some time but we haven’t had the time available to dedicate the attention this needed. So what’s changed? Well for one, Romio is live in beta in New York!
Our goal for Romio is to reinvent real estate search. To start, we’ve created an intelligent natural language real estate search engine. It’s designed to understand what you want without having to know exactly what to say. For instance, if you’re looking for a home with a ‘deck,’ we’ll help you out by bringing you listings that might have a ‘terrace,’ or a ‘patio,’ or a ‘porch.’
Soon, we’re going to be rolling out a cool social application that not only facilitates conversations among neighbors, but brings these conversations into the search engine so if you’re looking for apartments in Soho, for example, the listing will show you what people in Soho are talking about. We hope this brings a neighborhood-feel to the search process, and give you an inside look at the community you’re looking to become a part of.
This all started in 2007 and we’ve had a lot of help getting to where we are now, from industry experts in search and social engineering to traditional real estate brokerages. Some friends offered up their Silicon Valley offices (and well stocked fridges) and others met with us at night and worked weekends. We’re grateful to everyone who have believed in us and have helped us get this far.
And we’ve met a lot of interesting people. True story, we bumped into Brad Pitt in the elevator of Bergdorf Goodman once, and he laughed heartily when we straight up asked him to invest in Romio. He quickly said “So? What is it?” We weren’t expecting him to actually be interested, and naturally we froze. He was very nice, took our details and said he’d look at it (we didn’t have a site back then, though, so, Brad, if you’re listening, give us a call!)
This blog will be our place to share lessons learned, announcements from the Romio crew, and anything else we find interesting in the world of real estate and neighborhood and community happenings. We hope you’ll drop by from time to time and say hello.
In the meantime, if you’re so inclined, check out the current (beta) version of our real estate search engine at http://www.romio.com. We’re launching a social app soon (first in New York) and will let you know when that happens. We’ll need your help to kick the tires and make improvements so that we can bring you a better product.
Stay tuned!
-Romio Team