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Real Estate Wiki

Real Estate Encyclopedia for Home Buyers, Sellers and REALTOR® Professionals

A new independent wiki that exclusively covers and deals with the real
estate industry was officially launched recently. This is the
culmination of a group of dedicated real estate professionals that
laid down the groundwork to create the industry’s largest online free
encyclopedia, Real Estate Wiki, which was quietly launched in beta
in January with some 7,000 entries.

The combined effort has produced over 3,000 definitions for real
estate terms, almost 1,000 answers to frequently asked questions about
home buying, selling and financing questions, a list of over 500 real
estate acronyms, over 400 bio’s of prominent real estate leaders,
authors, over 600 real estate brokerage companies and details of some
800 real estate associations, institutes, councils, designations,
courses, blogs, social networks, publications … the list goes on and
on.

Wikipedia, the world’s biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia
on the Internet, has over seven million articles in over 200
languages. The Wikipedia categories include topics such as Culture,
Geography, History, Mathematics, Religion, etc. Due to its broad scope
the site does not really drill down into the industry specifics of
each profession or trade. Hence, the development of industry specific
wikis that focus exclusively on a specific profession or trade will
provide much more targeted information.

With an estimated 10 million people working in the real estate
industry in activities such as construction, brokerage, financial,
insurance, appraisal, etc., real estate is often cited as one of the
largest industries in the U.S. Furthermore, real estate has always
grabbed the imagination of the consumer and with over 30 million
consumers searching for homes to buy or places to rent every year. it
is the #1 search topic. according to Google.

During the first 6 weeks after its beta launch, RealEstateWiki.com has
expanded with over 3,000 new entries pushing the total to over 10,000
entries. Although RealEstateWiki.com has barely scratched the surface,
there is a solid foundation that will grow to become a great resource
for the industry and consumers: The 70 categories include:

* Glossary
* Acronyms
* Frequently Asked Questions
* Types of Real Estate
* Homes & Lifestyles
* Marketing & Advertising
* Who’s Who in Real Estate
* Settlement Service Providers
* Government and Local Authorities
* Associations, Institutes and Councils
* History of Real Estate
* Real Estate Media
* Real Estate Newspapers
* Online Real Estate News Services
* Real Estate Research
* Real Estate Training Schools
* Real Estate Brokerage Companies
* Real Estate Technology Providers

WikiWikiWeb was the first site to be called a wiki. It was started by
Ward Cunningham in 1994 and was based on the name of the Honolulu
International Airport shuttle called “Wiki-Wiki” … in Hawaiian that
means “fast.” In the early 2000s wikis were increasingly adopted in
enterprise as collaborative software. Common uses included project
communication, intranets and documentation. initially for technical
users. In March 2007 the word wiki was added to the Oxford English
Dictionary.

RealEstateWiki.com is a privately funded, non-profit, non-bias venture
with objectivity as a motive. Similar to Wikipedia, Real Estate Wiki
(www.RealEstateWiki.com) is hoping that volunteers from around the
U.S. in the real estate industry who believe strongly in Web 2.0 will
join the group of founding real estate professionals and cooperate to
together build the largest, highest quality, free real estate
encyclopedia in real estate as a resource for everyone to use.

CCAR members may use this as an additional
method of promoting yourself by adding your bi, company profiles and
contact details as well.

A FEW GOOD MEN AND WOMEN: RealEstateWiki is looking for volunteers
who are interested in leaving a legacy behind and wish to help build
RealEstateWiki into the largest free online encyclopedia for everyone
to use. Just log on and add any suitable real estate related
information.