[Tagging] shop=estate_agent and office=estate_agent

Tod Fitch tod at fitchdesign.com
Wed Dec 7 23:44:35 UTC 2016


For what it is worth, in the regional dialect of American English I speak and the area I live in, realtors (“estate agents” or “real estate agents”) work out of an “realty office” or a “real estate office”. It might be a “store front” office, but the office is very likely to only be open during normal local “office hours” rather than normal local “retail hours”. Its furnishings will be office like (desks, chairs, etc.) rather than retail like (display cases and counters). And much of the time the smaller concerns may have an office that is closed when the agents are out with clients or only be open by appointment or when there is paperwork to be signed.

I sold one house last year and purchased another. I never visited the office of the selling agent on the first house. And only visited the office we had for purchasing the other house twice, both times to sign some paperwork.

So from my experience, office=estate_agent makes more sense than shop=estate_agent.

It is a large world and customs and laws pertaining to the transfer of real estate could be much different elsewhere, but I’ll continue to think of them and tag them as offices.

> On Dec 7, 2016, at 2:48 PM, LeTopographeFou <letopographefou at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I will probably reopen an explosive case but I would like to know where we are reguarding shop=estate_agent vs office=estate_agent.
> 
> On the discussion page for the original proposal (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Estate_Agent <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Estate_Agent>) there is already some debates on this one but because the tag office was not yet created, shop has been prefered. And probably also because concensus was not strong enought toward office.
> 
> Several years after this debate, the wiki page of the approved one (shop=estate_agent) have been tagged as "to be merged", both shop and office are documented and here are the statistics:
> 
> office=estate_agent <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:office%3Destate_agent> (status in use) => 17 227 use
> shop=estate_agent <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Destate_agent> (status approved) => 3 818 use
> On editor side both JOSM and ID use office=estate_agent (unofficial) and do not recognise shop=estate_agent (official). This will definitively not help the approved one to grow.
> Consequently it looks like the "in use" one is killing (has already killed?) the "approved" one.
> 
> => Is there any ongoing plan to clarify the situation? Any up to date discussion page/proposal I did not found yet?
> 
> If one ask for my opinion, I would tend to say that we shall not think by purpose of the company but by purpose of the place we map (OSM is all about mapping right?):
> a shop is where you can buy something, regardless it is a desk in the midddle of a room or nice rows of shelves with products and prices. Consequently a "place" at the corner of the street where you can enter and buy a real estate would be a shop.
> an office is where people are working, usually at desks, and are not primarily dedicated to wait for customers, welcome them and sell products. Consequently, the headquarter of this real estate chain (or a building dedicated to an administrative or internal service) would be an office.
> If everything (selling and administrative) is at the same place, I think that shop should be prefered (but one can use both on the same object).
> This is like the HQ of a bank or a post company: it's more an office than an amenity (and sometimes there is no counter nor ATM inside).
> 
> In this scenario shop=estate_agent and office=estate_agent would coexist, each one with its own meaning (or another mecanism to differenciate an open shop from a limited-access office, both working to sell/manage real estates, would be devised). Same principle can be applied to insurances, law firms... which are suffering from the same issue.
> Yours,
> -- 
> LeTopographeFou


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