Expatistan.com: Distilling The Wisdom Of The Crowd, One Price At A Time

Online, January 16, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Crowdsourced cost of living index turns one year old

When Gerardo Robledillo decided to create Expatistan.com, he was essentially "scratching his own itch." The Madrid native had already relocated his life within Europe four times in just six years, and whenever it came time to negotiate his salary with a new employer, Robledillo says he was "basically blind. I knew how much I was making in my current city, and I knew how much I wanted to make relative to my current income, but I had no idea how much that would translate to in the new city."

Expatistan.com essentially allows users - potential expats - to compare the cost of living between cities around the world, and obtain a more detailed understanding of what kinds of expenses they would encounter on a daily basis if they were to move to a certain city.

The site collects the prices used in the comparisons from their own users. Expatistan.com encourages people from all over the world to chip in with information on local prices of various products and services.

One year after the launch, the project already has 68,000 different prices for 435 different cities. 17,500 different people, coming from 110 different countries, have contributed information to the project.

By the very nature of crowd-sourced projects, Expatistan.com is updated in real time and is self-correcting. Robledillo points out that even with all of the flaws that the crowd-sourcing method may bring, the end results seem to be well in sync with other cost of living indexes that exist.

"There really is wisdom in the crowd," Robledillo says with a smile, "you only have to help the crowd to express it in a meaningful way".

While giant corporations like Mercer also provide cost of living data, Expatistan.com, put together on a shoestring budget, is a project that by relying in the selfless help of the crowd, can also offer reliable cost of living information, that is freely available and transparent.

"Expatistan.com may be the underdog - coded and run by a single person in his free time. It may have zero budget for marketing and research staff, but with the help and aggregated knowledge of thousands of people, it can compete with the corporations," Robledillo points out.