If you’re looking to hole up in a swank new joint or just feel curious about housing development in your burg, then you’ll probably want to bookmark a project that Andu‘s been working on because it’s pretty spiffy.

Without being forced to register for anything, you can get both your hands dirty right away searching for properties that meet your interest. There are an impressively robust number of parameters you can access to refine your search to deliver some fairly specific results.

For example, I was curious to find new apartment construction in Braşov which featured air conditioning (an amazingly rare thing). To do that, I access the filters in the right hand column.

Clicking on Braşov, the site indicated my choice with a green checkmark and then filtered out the other cities. For other filters, you just rinse, lather, repeat.

For some of areas outside Bucureşti, the number of results to be found are a little anemic. I gather this is largely due to the realities that most of this sort of development is happening the capital with a slower pace of growth in other major cities.

But what I was most impressed by was the fact that Rez.ro makes the effort to identify and present the construction initiatives across the country. A less-visionary group would have clung to the folly of myopic focus on Bucureşti exclusively. Instead, they’ve made a smart move to be inclusive.

So, once I’d been given a list of search results matching my criteria, it was time to take a look at the respectable number of details provided by Rez.ro’s online database. If the construction company makes the general property information available, then Rez.ro shares that with you.

For some properties there is more information than others. In my case, I could read some of the marketing information about the apartment having spacious design, energy-efficient storm windows, a phone jack in the bedroom, and other little data niceties.

One of the first things I wanted to do was click the thumbnail images for the property. Instead of popping up a new window (because we all use browsers like Firefox to block annoying popups, don’t we?) which might result in new tabs for some of us with 90 tabs open, the website developers made a very intelligent decision to simply overlay a layer right on top of the existing page.

Although Google does not have quality satellite photos of Romania (except decent quality in Bucureşti), people like Martin have implemented a system to overlay the location of the apartments on top of Google Maps in order to give you a good approximation as to where precisely the development is going on in your town.

As you see, Google’s images aren’t so hot for Braşov. But, if you know your own city, then you’ll recognize the location and immediately know where it’s located. Of course, Rez.ro will benefit in the future when Google updates their satellite photos to the “quite okay” level of detail available for Bucureşti.

For registered users, you can start/join a public bulletin board discussion about the property or even save it in your own list of ‘favorites’ which is basically a watch list you can use to keep track of apartment complexes you are interested in (or to keep up-to-date on the competition, if you’re in the real estate game).

Unfortunately, if you aren’t registered you get a rather unfriendly message.

Hopefully, Rez.ro will review little annoyances like that in the future. In this case, instead of a penalty message, the user should have been invited to sign up along with a short bullet list of reasons why (“what have you done for me lately?”).

From the details page, even unregistered people can email property details to someone, contact the property developers with your sales inquiry, or click for a list of the individual apartments inside the particular property in order to find a particular one.

Let’s say I want to be on the 3rd floor (not too high in case the elevator breaks, as the Romanian ones invariably do) but not on the lowest levels where you get lots of noise from passing cars and foot traffic.

Remember, my American friends, in Romania, the first floor is not called the first floor. It’s called the parter. And “etaj 1″ is the second floor…

Ah, here we go. Etaj 2, with three rooms, and rather sizable 108 square meters (approx.1162 sq ft).

Clicking for more details shows me the building has four floors, which means someone will be living above me. One and a half baths means I can direct guests to the toilet that isn’t cluttered with bathroom malarkey.

Oh, look, a floorplan layout! Say, that looks relatively swanky in my book.

I hope Rez.ro has someone tasked with getting higher resolution images, because I’d like to see that floorplan a bit larger. Sometimes getting timely cooperation from property developers can be like pulling teeth, so I’m happy to see they have anything at all.

Since I haven’t won the Romanian lottery, how would I go about paying for this comfortable living space? Well, Rez.ro has the pertinent information broken down for you with a nice financial review of what the terms are for your particular apartment.

And that’s what’s ultimately motivating this website. I’m sure you’ve been wondering what kindly soul dreamt up such a great system for researching new apartment construction in Romania. Quite simply, they’re hoping to make a buck by helping you finance your purchase.

CreditLink is the driver behind the wheel here. From what I gather, they’re essentially playing the role of mortgage broker. They’ll help you get organized for a loan application, then work with several major lenders in order to get you approved. For their blood, sweat, and tears necessary to make sure you get that beautiful apartment, they pick up a fat commission.

Everybody wins!

I think CreditLink has a real winner on it’s hands with Rez.ro. The work being done by folks like Andu and Martin should have a big pay-off down the line. This is one of those great projects that borrows good ideas from other countries, then localizes them for the Romanian market.

Someone’s gotta do it. And these people have done a fine job indeed. I think it’s absolutely great that someone put together a solid plan based on a vision of what can be done here in Romania. Combine that with some quality execution and you get Rez.ro, a website you can easily recommend to friends in the market for new apartments.

Martin indicates an English version will be arriving in March.

In my mysterious past, I’ve had direct experience with exactly what it takes to create and market a complex, profitable, online real estate system which had previously never been seen before in the United States. Therefore, I am quite certain a large amount of work has been poured into Rez.ro and what its’ potential for long-term valuation might be.

There are a number of ways in which CreditLink can further monetize the value of this web application, but they’ll have to keep a steady hand on the wheel to determine which opportunities should be passed over, for fear of driving away users, and which revenue streams should absolutely not be overlooked.

I hope they continue to refine the system, add new features, and invest in the human resources necessary to dramatically improve the quality and amount of content. Content development and cooperative partnerships will improve the user experience, provide alternate revenue streams, and drive the core mortgage brokering business.

They’ll also need to keep a very close eye on scalability, because any poor performance of the site will become part of the brand. It was running very fast when I first tried it a couple weeks ago, but today it was noticeably slower.

You can easily forgive that because they’re the only game in town as far as I know. However, when the competition arrives trumpeting some shiny new website, you don’t want to be known as that old slow site.

In the meantime, congratulations to whole team behind Rez.ro for their efforts to develop a truly innovative player in the Romanian real estate market. I’d rate CreditLink’s Rez.ro as a strong example for other companies to follow the lead of and for other industries to view as a role model.

The Romanian real estate industry has begun evolving.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Business, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.