Start-up uses Web to help towns market their property

[NEW YORK] Two public policy graduates at the Kennedy School at Harvard University are trying to build a business of helping municipalities with a task at which they're notoriously deficient: managing and marketing their real estate portfolios.

Called OpportunitySpace, the start-up works with municipal governments to put their publicly owned real estate holdings in a public online database. Specifics about each property, such as square footage, assessed value and delinquent taxes, are linked to its address. The parcels are mapped geographically.

The developers, Cristina Garmendia and Alexander Kapur, say their 2013 master's thesis spawned the business, which is nearing the end of its incubation phase at the Harvard Innovation Lab. The mission of OpportunitySpace, they say, is threefold.