Who We Are

We’re a single company wearing a great number of hats. Like that guy in the Wizard of Oz, who keeps turning up, as the doorman, the coach driver, and finally, as the great and powerful Oz himself. Unlike Oz, we’re starting out with the curtain pulled wide open. We’re not pretending to be anything we’re not. That’s the whole point. Because many, many many places out there in the intertubes are not what they appear to be. Fake review sites put up by a single company to hawk their product. So called “price-search” engines which whir and spin and cough up a dozen different stores–all with prices within a few dollars of each other, all 30% more expensive than Amazon.com. And worst of all, the crapware sites, the sites made up links and links and more links and panes of links and google adword lozenges. These sites are the equivalent of urine soaked hallways in abandoned public housing projects. No place anyone wants to be. Places you scurry through on your way to somewhere else. Ugly, soul-sucking wastes of time. We don’t want to make sites like that.

Part of the Problem

Unfortunately, Google rewards this behavior, so now this crapware spreads like kudzu, a deepening layer sitting on top of the acutal content you were looking for. The Crapware is produced by the SEO marketers doing the Google Dance. What is the Google dance? That’s the process of tricking Google into feeding traffic into your network of sites, which you then direct somewhere else. SEO marketers figure out what Google likes, and they make it. The problem is, Google is an idiot. You probably know that computers aren’t smart. They do stuff fast. They execute algorithms. And guess what—Algorithms are stupid. Ever wonder why you’re being asked to fill in those characters with the wavy lines before logging into a website? To prove you’re a human. To prove you’re not a computer. Computers, the sad, dumb, superfast things, can’t read a letter which is smeared and blured and tilted and jammed into another letter. If a computer can’t do that, how can it tell a real website from a bunch of worthless SEO crapware? The answer is, it can’t. All the algorithm can hope to do is to detect the odor of humanity that rises off of hunks of human generated text. So the spammers started harvesting that, sampling it, and injecting it into the crapware. What does all this have to do with Real Boston Apartments, with OnMarketBoston, with the Boston Realty Hub?

A Painful Admission

First, an admission: we worked at this for a number of years with the assumption that Google was smarter than it turns out to be. We figured if we pooled real data from real apartments, the world would beat a path to our door. The realtors smirked at us–they knew. Nobody can tell the difference. We persevered. We knew that good things can spread and grow on the net, word of mouth on the web can cause something cool to go viral. We concentrated on amassing contents, amassing the relationships, building the software. But still, in the Google rankings, at the SEO finish line, the crapware won. Sites we knew were choked with out of date, redundant and fake listings were beating us hands down. The algorithm’s are even worse than figuring out what’s real than humans are.

Fighting Fire with Fire—The Ethical Way

So we decided to go viral—not by flooding OnMarketBoston with zillions of fake listings, but by seeding this message, this story, into as many sites, into as many articles, as possible. We’re going to work the social media sites. We’re going to do silly things that create press releases that feed into news stories that turn into links. We’re going to play the game the way it’s played, because underneath it all, we have a product that is worth talking about.

A Time of Change

As a nation we’ve emerged from a time of great darkness; we’re fighting through an economic collapse brought on by lies. By a lack of transparency. By an under-regulated market. Now, we’re just a smallish company in a biggish city trying to save apartment hunters a lot of time and effort, but we’re also on the side of the angels. Because we want to bring you real information. We want to tell you the truth. And we want you to help us spread the word. It takes a few seconds. If you are looking for apartments, if your friends are, if anyone you know is, tell them about us. Link to us. Use the Add This button to create pointers to us in as many communities as you regularly use. It costs you nothing but a moment’s time, and in so doing, you become a voice for change. Apartment Listings We Can Believe in! Not a huge thing—but can you imagine if it caught on? Can you imagine buying a used car with perfect information, a house, can you imagine a cell phone calling plan or a cable bundle price Scheme that didn’t make your head hurt? Can you imagine a world where people bargained fairly in the open light of day, where you knew what the margins were, what you were paying for when you used an agent or broker, knowing the cost and benefit of every business intermediary in every transaction you engage in? Throw us a link. We’ll keep mining the apartment data and sharing it with you. Spread the word. Knowledge is power. Ignorance is expensive. And we can all make a difference.