BackseatBeat: Rotten Neighbors
Have a problem with your neighbors? Stinky cooking? Brutes that bully? Miserable miscreants? Drug deals and loud parties? Animals allowed to breed like cockroaches? Or do you just live next door to inconsiderate hillbillies? Now there is an online place for you to vent: RottenNeighbor.com started by Brandt Walker, is a fast growing site for people to both complain about the boorish behavior of nuisance neighbors and a great resource for those who are looking to move.
Most of the people do not name names, but do give the specific address for the complaint. If you have a red dot on your house, look out - it could spell real estate trouble.
Brant opened the site for anyone to post about anyone and right away hit a nerve. Each day, the site gets thousands of postings about neighbor horror stories.
Neighbors being tattled on generally aren’t identified by name but their home, right down to the street address, is. Experts say the site can seriously impact a home’s worth.
“The question is how far would you have to drop your house in order to make it saleable if everyone knows you have bad neighbors? It might be you know a third. It could easily be a third. It’s hard to calculate but I’ll tell you, it could definitely be a lot,” Phyllis Rockower from the Real Estate Investment Club of L.A.
Brant says protecting people’s privacy isn’t his concern. He believes he can help save home hunters from making uninformed decisions. “You have so many real estate engines out there helping people find out where they want to live. This is the first one of its kind helping people find out where they don’t want to live.”
I like the idea, however, there is no way to police subjective, slanderous, racist and petty allegations. Additionally there does not seem to be an edit feature for someone who posts something in haste. (I didn’t find it but the site is running very slow and I gave up.) The first time someone is told they will not purchase a house because of a complaint on this site, well, you can smell the lawsuit from dimished property values, etc. Brandt is in a good position though; lots of heavily funded, private backers to the site. If you are checking out the site, be aware it’s slow running.
photo source: curbed.com
POSTED BY: Daisy
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