One industry at a time, from health care to music, small companies are transforming how we discover and contract with professionals. Now Architizer is getting into the game. The site, best known for featuring architects’ portfolios, is betting that it can attract real estate developers and private owners with ground-up projects and match those buyers with its community of design talent. “Finding an architect is a task filled with mystery and frustration,” Architizer founder and CEO Marc Kushner, AIA, said in a statement. Kushner launched Find an Architect today with the goal of solving that problem.
On the site, users looking for an architect post their project type, location, and estimated square footage. Architects express interest, based on those parameters, and then submit formal proposals if they make a user’s shortlist. Outside of projects for institutional clients like museums and government agencies, most building commissions today are the result of hard-won architect-client relationships. Find an Architect could disrupt that dynamic, and help individual practitioners compete against larger firms. Sites like Houzz already offer a similar solution for residential remodeling projects.
Architizer, in contrast, is focused on larger-scale, from-scratch projects, which are a more natural extension of the B2B marketplace of 35,000 firms that Architizer has grown since 2009 with a business model that relies on promoted product listings and ads. Find an Architect promises to bring a new layer of transparency to the market, but that promise only extends so far: Because architects are licensed by state, the site is only as useful as the talent available in your backyard. ( By Ainsley O’Connell from Fastcodesign.com ) For more details, visit the link below.