Here’s a common buyer / renter scenario.

You’re thinking about buying or renting a new home. You drive past a highrise or a housing complex that looks attractive, and you want to know more about it.

Where do you start? You could stop, and inquire, but that’s often a waste of time. You could call your real estate agent, if you have one – but that’s also often a waste of time (or worse).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could go online and find one or more Web pages profiling the property just by scanning property profiles for the ZIP code in which it’s located? If a number of profiles have been posted by different real estate professionals for the property you’re interested in, you’d also get a sense of who’s an expert about the property and who might not be. The right kind of system would also enable you to communicate anonymously with the real estate professionals until you develop a comfort level with one or more of them.

Well, that’s one of the scenarios that the Housing profiles category of HomePagesUSA is designed to accommodate.

In an earlier post we suggested the need for an overview of a group of similar properties. And, we noted, creating profiles of the individual properties would be the place for a real estate professional to start putting such an overview together.

We’ve just created a Web page with HomePagesUSA to post some suggested best practices for real estate professionals who want to create Housing profiles. You can see that best practices Web page here.

Add your comments and suggestions here, and we’ll incorporate the best ones in our best practices.

There are about a dozen highrise condo and co-op buildings fronting Chicago’s Lincoln Park along Fullerton, Lakeview and Diversey. These buildings, collectively, form a distinct housing sub-market.

I have no doubt that there are many home buyers who’d love to see an intelligent comparative overview of these buildings, their features, amenities, common areas, floor plans, views, services, policies, selling prices, their pluses and minuses, their delights and annoyances. Add an insider’s perspective on the buildings – what’s distinctive about each of them, which ones have litigious boards, which ones house well-known residents, what’s the story on the famously private co-ops at 2430, 2440 and 2450 Lakeview, whether a building might be facing a special assessment, and so on. Provide photo tours and write-ups on what the park and the neighborhood have to offer in this area, together with links to sites with more information.

That’s a package of information that every highrise buyer would want – for this area, and for other areas.

A number of real estate agents have extensive familiarity with these buildings and could provide the overview that buyers want. To our knowledge, no one has done so.

If I were to build this type of an overview, I’d start by creating a Home Page Web site for each of the buildings in the Housing profiles category of HomePagesUSA. I’d ask a number of people outside of the real estate business to critique my pages to ensure that I was writing in a voice that people could relate to rather than in the traditional, stilted real estate-ese.

We’ll be on the lookout for good examples of highrise Housing profiles that we can call to your attention. Or, build one of your own and let us know about it so we can point other people to it.

More on this subject, later.