Though Boston is currently enjoying a renaissance of high-end, luxury housing development, many others in the city are being priced out of traditionally more affordable neighborhoods. Wouldn’t it be nice, then, if that prime, yet vacant, plot of land down the street, ripe for the taking, just aching to be built on, could be all yours – whether to start a new businesses, run a farmer’s market or host some kind of public art venue event? Real estate firm OpportunitySpace aims to do exactly that.

It recently came to light in an audit commissioned by Mayor Marty Walsh that the Boston Redevelopment Authority owns acres upon acres of real estate throughout the city that’s vacant, underdeveloped, underutilized and/or non-revenue generating. OpportunitySpace bridges the gap between the government and the people so that city-owned parcels can be publicly sold.

OpportunitySpace works by engaging and examining a slew of metrics and data to aggregate pieces of real estate and display them all in one place. Not sure if the BRA owns, for example, a Charlestown pier with vista views of the city skyline and harbor and want to see if it’s for sale? Simply run a search on their site, using filters for neighborhoods and zoning if so desired, and voilŕ: you’re one step closer to owning a piece of land few people likely knew was on the market.

Though co-founders Cristina Garmendia and Alex Kapur, both graduates of the Harvard Kennedy School says OpportunitySpace currently lists properties in Louisville, Kentucky as well as a coalition of cities in Rhode Island, Boston isn’t too far of the horizon. Things are still up in the air at the BRA, as evidenced by Mayor Walsh’s sweeping audit and perpetual promises to shake things up there. Despite a boom in luxury housing, the city is still questioning how best to overhaul and utilize it’s developing arm.

“Right now, the City of Boston is undergoing a lot of change,” Kapur told BostInno. “Until that’s more clear – what the outcome of that is – we’re just having conversations.”

Those partnership conversations, she confirmed, have all been productive.

Because, in addition to just listing properties, OpportunitySpace helps governments prepare to advertise their goods contemporarily – using digital platforms, for example. And, they help make sure that those governments reimagine the land in ways that benefit the area and its residents at-large.

That’s why, for right now, OpportunitySpace is doing work in Louisville and Providence. Those cities have all partnered up with OpportunitySpace so that they can figure out the best way to make use of, for example, Louisville Gardens, which is a 220,000-square-foot facility sitting on an entire city block that was an armory in a past life. Now, suggestions like indoor hockey rinks and farmer’s markets have been proposed for the mammoth property.

“It’s not just having the right idea, but the right partners to make the idea happen,” Garmendia posits.

In Providence, Rhode Island, OpportunitySpace is helping to market the old Flynn Elementary School, which currently occupies four acres of downtown property. What’s different from how OpportunitySpace is revamping Rhode Island’s cities than Louisiville, though, is that they gained much of their knowledge from doing research on the latter and began to understand the problem in government space and property management. So, with The Ocean State, they’re approaching the issues through a regional focus and growing around that. By doing this, they can add value to smaller scale cities – the size and scope of Louisville is exponentially larger than Providence and its neighboring municipalities.

As for Boston, it’s unclear at this point what they’re strategy will be. How the dust settles from the constant BRA reorganizations will determine when Boston-owned properties hit the market and how they’ll be advertised.

“The issues with Boston really are the data being a critical component of the technology,” noted co-founder and CEO Alex Kapur. “We’re still trying to figure out the exact priorities in terms of listing sites, listing zoning information and or incentives. There’s certainly a lot of forward movement in the conversation.”

Know of a vacant lot or underutilized property in Boston? Let us know it’s location and your ideas for redevelopment in the comments section below.