"Novy Dom" (New Home; dom.r52.ru) was a Nizhny Novgorod website about new residential construction, a catalogue of housing under construction in Nizhny Novgorod and the surrounding region. The project belonged to the Nizhny Novgorod internet company "R52.RU"[1] and was part of its family of themed sites alongside "Dating", "Mobile Communications", "Monitoring", "Job Exchange" and StreetRacing[1]. The earliest surviving copy of the home page is dated 5 December 2004[1], the latest copy read is dated 20 January 2022[5].

"We want something new!": the launch

The first snapshot catches the site at its very beginning: the counter on the home page showed "New developments in total: 10"[1]. The page opened with "A Word from the Editor" — a programmatic text on why the company needed one more project. As the home page announced, "R52.RU" was offering "a new project devoted to new construction — new houses, new apartments, new housing", and promised to tell readers "about the new developments of Nizhny Novgorod, about the main problems you may encounter in this field", to give legal advice, to characterise the districts of Nizhny Novgorod, to show the buildings, the layouts of apartments and offices "and even the views from the windows"[1].

The tone of the editorial materials was emphatically colloquial. The 2004 home page advertised "The complete list of documents required for registering title under a contract for the sale of property rights (UYuNO requirements)" and the piece "Relatively honest ways of taking money on the real estate market"[1]. By 2007 the site's header carried an epigraph — the phrase of Zbigniew Kholodyuk, "Nothing divides people so much as shared housing"[2].

Sections and content

The menu remained almost unchanged throughout the years: "Real Estate Search", "Construction News", "Real Estate Transactions", "Market Analytics", "Housing Loans", "NN Reference", "'Construction' Company Directory", "Classified Ads", "Terminology", "Advertising on the Server"; later "City News" and "Links" were added to them[1][2]. The catalogue itself was divided into three showcases: "Commercial New Developments", "New Apartments" and "New Developments Outside the City"[1]. The editorial e-mail address was given right in the header — DOM@R52.RU[1].

The card of a new development included a description, the address, the developer and the seller. By July 2007 the counter showed 72 objects[2]. Among the latest additions of that summer was a new residential quarter in the Sormovsky district within the boundaries of Engelsa and Kominterna streets, on the site of the building of former School No. 88: the developer was listed as the investment and construction company "Sokolniki", and the designs were made by the city development institute "NizhegorodgrazhdanNIIproekt"[2]. There too was a ten-storey building on Narodnaya Street by "Nizhegorodstroy", about which the site wrote that elite housing was being built in the centre, "while for the broad masses housing of the so-called improved type is being built in the trans-Oka part of Nizhny Novgorod"[2]. Third came the "Izumrudny Zamok" (Emerald Castle) residential complex on Gorky Street near Gorky Square: a construction area of 2.4 hectares, about 100,000 sq m of housing, start of construction in the second quarter of 2006, completion of the whole complex in the fourth quarter of 2010, developer OOO "RosAvtoStroy"[2].

The news column collected reports of Nizhny Novgorod agencies and publications — the Business Monitoring Agency, RIA "Vremya N", "Kurs-N", "Delovoy Kvartal" (Business Quarter) and the Nizhny Novgorod "Komsomolskaya Pravda"[2][3]. In the footer of the 2007 page stood the line "Legal support by 'Kotin and Partners'" with the telephone numbers (8312) 77-58-67 and 77-59-50[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

"Novy Dom" took part in the voting of Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day in 2004 and received 2 votes there[6] — by the standards of that contest this is the result of a site that was noticed but gathered no audience. No separate line for dom.r52.ru was found in the summary slices of the Counter.nn.ru rating, from which the balance of forces in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet was reconstructed: it entered the census precisely through the lists of the 2004 Internet Day[6]. The measurement methodology and the general picture of the rating are examined in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

Standstill and closure

The development of the site ceased at the end of the 2000s. The most recent news item that ever appeared on the home page is dated 19 February 2009 — an announcement of the 2nd specialised exhibition "Low-Rise Construction. Investments. Projects. Technologies. Structural Elements", scheduled for 1–4 April 2009[3]. The counter of objects froze at the mark "New developments in total: 77"[3]. After that the page did not change for thirteen years: the snapshots of 2012, 2014 and 2022 coincide word for word — the same residential complexes "Maksima" on Lopatina Street, 32-33, "Uyutny" (Cosy) at Rodionova — Delovaya, and "Serebryanye Klyuchi" (Silver Springs) at 1st Oranzhereynaya Street, 30, in the Sovetsky district[3][4][5].

The only thing that went on being updated on the frozen page was the advertising blocks, and in them it is visible that the thematic connection had been lost: in 2012, next to Nizhny Novgorod new developments, they offered daily rental of an apartment in Samara; in 2014, the hire of an aerial platform truck in Kyiv[3][4]. The latest copy of the home page read in the web archive is dated 20 January 2022[5]. A probe taken while this census was being compiled recorded that the address dom.r52.ru no longer responds.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day voting results, 2004 (archive)