The death and life of the industrial corridor linking New York and Washington:
The weirdness of this juxtaposition is hardly acknowledged anymore, because we’ve all had a few decades to get used to it. But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants, Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America’s driving force.
Introduction
Hey everyone, my name is Brandon Donnelly.
I work in real estate development, building buildings.
The Problem
My startup is called Dirt.
It’s based on the idea that there’s tons of real estate activity happening all around us and we’re missing out on it.
Why can’t I follow properties?
Why don’t get I get push updates when stuff sells/rents?
Why don’t I get construction updates sent to my phone for the building I bought into?
Why can’t I see if any of my friends are moving into the same building?
The two pain points I most commonly hear from real estate consumers are:
There’s a lack of accessible information; and,
They’re frustrated always going through agents because they don’t feel they really add value.
The Solution
What I want to do is shift the industry focus from the suppliers of real estate to the consumers of real estate (you and me).
Dirt is a network for crowdsourcing real estate activity.
To share, users simply:
Find the address
Upload activity
Categorize it
Think of it as Path (the social network) for real estate.
The goals are to empower consumers and promote transparency.
The business model is to own the real estate analytics space.
I hope you’ll join me in trying to disrupt real estate.