A little over a month ago, a new player entered the real estate research market, but brought a twist. Instead of licensing data from the Department of Lands, like RPData, Melbourne-based Home Price History has created a site where users can store their own information about property and, in the meantime, contribute to a communal pool of property research information that will be accessible by all users.

It’s an interesting idea. There’s certainly a lot of information that’s available whether through real estate sites, the relevant Department of Lands or newspapers, which could help build up the communal database. The obvious issue, however, is that many properties don’t trade hands for years, and unless data is brought in from non-user generated sources, there will be gaps in the information.

Because of that founder Robert Reith, and the Home Price History team, have chosen to focus on building a site that helps people store information about property rather than going straight after the RPData type services.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no scope to add to that in the near future, however.  For instance, while RPData does have excellent historical data, which Home Price History would struggle to compete against, they do charge $59.95 for a suburb history report for the past 12 months, which is something that Home Price History could conceivably begin to compete against in the not too distant future. A bit of recent data scraping (where permitted, of course) or aggregation, to compliment the user input, and they might be able to compete even sooner.

Then again, the obvious question is how do you charge people for data that they’ve participated in creating? Maybe there could be a credit system of some sort, where the more data you put in the more you can take out, otherwise you have to pay for credits. Maybe they plan to sell supporting services like financial services. Maybe the team have something completely different in mind. Who knows? Either way, it’s clear that the key at the moment is to minimise the barrier to participation in order to build the critical mass that will make their service viable in its current incarnation.

I’ve had a play with the site and the interface is easy enough to use. Signing up is easy and the services around the information storage are simple and intuitive. There’s even a pretty neat SMS function that let’s you SMS in notes to your profile notepad.

Growth wise, the site’s doing well. As I mentioned earlier, they launched last month and there are already over 4000 properties which are being profiled.

The truth though, is that I’m still not certain about whether or not this is a stand-alone winner. Then again, I’m not really in the market to buy a property (or rent one, seeing as there is a rent watch feature as well) so it’s probably best to sit back and keep an eye on adoption rates.

I can’t help but think though that in conjunction with other services, like another Melbourne-based startup property research site, Street Advisor, there’s real potential for them to disrupt the fairly closed local real estate research market.

Should be interesting to see what happns in this space.