ago, if you were involved with the Web in Boston, one of the people you likely ran into was a forward-thinking Cambridge real estate broker named Bill Wendel. In 1995, before most people had Internet access at home, he opened the Real Estate Café outside of Harvard Square.
Wendel saw the Internet as “a tool to correct the problems in the industry,” giving buyers more information and lowering the fees they paid as part of buying a home. But in 1995, there wasn’t a way for buyers to search the primary database of for-sale properties — so Wendel opened a storefront where they could do that, long before Trulia, Redfin, or Zillow came along.