Getting the Market Sentiment Right

Great article in the NY Times today about the role of housing as an investment vehicle.  What caught my attention was this:

In an annual survey conducted by the economists Robert J. Shiller and Karl E. Case, hundreds of new owners in four communities — Alameda County near San Francisco, Boston, Orange County south of Los Angeles, and Milwaukee — once again said they believed prices would rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade.

With minor swings in sentiment, the latest results reflect what new buyers always seem to feel. At the boom’s peak in 2005, they said prices would go up. When the market was sliding in 2008, they still said prices would go up.

Moving beyond the game - measuring the sentiment

Realius is moving beyond the game to measuring the consumer sentiment of local real estate markets.  When individuals shopping for real estate at our partner, Zip Realty's website, they will see our prediction widget in the sidebar of each property listing.  We have come up with a way to aggregate the thousands of predictions we obtain into an index that measures how people feel about local real estate markets from a price perspective.  We call our index the Market Sentiment Index.  As the chart below shows, when measured across the United States, our index has been tracking the Case-Shiller index. Since the index is base on real time perceptions of real estate markets, our index is 60 days ahead of Case Shiller.  Below is a graph of the index based on data through May 2010.  I will hold back on the real time results for the moment.  If you want to learn more, contact us at info@realius.com.

Predict the price of homes @ Zip Realty - you might win $500!

Our partner, Zip Realty, has launched a contest that runs through May 15, 2009. Read more about it in their blog. Predict the price of at least 20 homes and you will have a chance to win $5oo. Do a good job at reading the market and your name will be at the top of the Leaderboard. What are you waiting for.  Sign up at Zip Realty and search for homes at their site.  Search for homes in an area where you want to buy or where you own a home.  View the property details and you will see the prediction widget in the left hand column.

Geek Estate Blog Covers Realius Prediction Widget

Drew Meyers authored two posts over at the Geek Estate Blog covering the launch of our prediction widget with Zip Realty.  The first article, ZipRealty Integrates Community Estimating Technology from Realius, covers the history of our work with Zip and Drew's thoughts on collecting price estimates from the community at large. Drew notes:

It’s going to take a little bit of time for community estimates to build up to a point where there are 5 or 10 estimates on many listings, but I think it’s a great feature for consumers in the long run. Over the long haul, a high IQ could prove to be a way for agents to demonstrate they know their local market well.

He also poses some key questions for the Geek Estate Community:

If you are an agent or broker, do you see any value to using this feature to estimate listing prices?

for the agents and brokers reading this, aside from the cost, do you see any reason not to integrate this functionality in your web site?

His last question is for me - but I can't answer it right now: "any other guesses as to the next brokerage to add community estimating to their offering?" Drew's second post is a great interview with Myron Lo from Zip Realty.  Myron provides his insight on the benefit of adding community predictions to the Zip site.

Q: What kind of feedback did you get from consumers? A: The overall feedback from our customers was great. In addition to making real estate a little more fun, our customers appreciated the extra price opinion they would get with the ‘ZIP Community Price’. The biggest suggestion they had for us was to integrate our community pricing more tightly with our main website so that they’d be able to see price predictions for the specific homes they were interested in.

If you are interested in adding community estimating to your site - drop me a note at chuck.teller (at) realius.com.

Predict Widget Launches @ Ziprealty.com

This morning our prediction widget launched in association with our national real estate partner, Zip Realty. The widget is more than the standard read-only data widgets that you often see.  Our widget has read-write capabilities and includes user state management (sign up / sign in / already predicted). Now our partners can now embed our prediction widget right into their site.  The user no longer has to leave the real estate site to enter a prediction, view the current community estimate and see their current IQ. Our widget is not a one-size fits all.  You can use our standard widget design or roll your own with CSS.  Our standard widget can be integrated into your site as an embedded i-frame.  If space is tight, you can trigger the i-frame from a button on your site.  If you want to roll your own design, like Zip Realty, have your in-house designer reskin and resize the widget to meet your needs by using the CSS (cascading style sheet). We provide three supporting pages to the widget.  The prediction details page, player profile page and all players page.  Once you predict, you can get to the prediction details page by selecting View All Predictions link.  If you want to review all of your predictions, select the My Predictions link from within the widget.  From either of these pages, you can get to the All Players by selecting the Players link in the upper left hand corner of the page. All of the data shown on the predictions detail, player profile or all players pages can be accessed through our API and integrated into your site as you like. The best part about the widget is that it is super easy to install and configure.  In the coming days, we will be publishing installation instructions.  Stay tuned. So if you want to know what the market thinks the homes you are trying to sell are worth - install your prediction market widget and start harnessing the collective wisdom of the crowd. In the meantime, head on over to Zip Realty's site (registration is required), search for a property, view the property details and make your prediction of the sale price - it is easy to find just to the right of the photos. Want to know how well you can read the market?  Predict the price of homes in areas you are tracking, then monitor the predictions as the flow in by visiting the property details page and select View All Predictions from the widget.  Once the home sells, we'll let you know how close you were to the final sales price.  Play the market for 30-60 days and you will know better than most where prices stand.

Join us in harnessing the collective wisdom of the market place. Predict it - you make the market.

Live from Australia

Price Me Now, the real estate prediction market, launched with our Australian Partner RP Data last week.  Currently you can price homes in Sydney and Brisbane.  We will be adding more markets shortly. You can find cool homes in magical areas like Bondi Beach by going to http://propertyiq.com.au and searching.  We'll find the homes nearby that are on the market and you can start learning the Australian real estate market and building your PropertyIQ.

New Player Profile and Home Detail

We've updated our player profile and home detail pages to make them much more useful.  Here are the highlights.

Player Profile - we now list all your predictions in an easy to read table format. You can filter the list by the locations you have played. I like to play the homes near where I live, so one of my top locations is my home address.  Every couple of weeks, I start the game and play this location so that I can stay on top of prices in my neighborhood. We also separate the homes you have made predictions on by status - For Sale, Pending and Sold.  The "For Sale" homes are still on the market and the Community Price is changing as more predictions flow in.  You can scan the list quickly to see which homes are getting lots of action - we list the number of predictions on each home.  The "Pending" homes are off the market, but the sales price is not in yet.  There are no more predictions on Pending homes - we are just waiting for the sales price to be recorded.  Lastly are the "Solds".  In the upper right hand portion of the page, we show the homes that you have predicted and we have collected the sales price.  We let you know your IQ against the final sales price and we show you how your prediction ranks against others. Click any home address to get to the new Home Details Page. The Home details page shows you all the predictions on the house sorted by the closest to the Sales Price for homes that have sold or Community Price for homes that are still on the market or Pending.  For homes that have sold, in the last column, we record your final Property IQ - the measure of how well you predicted the sales price.  One thing to keep in mind when viewing the Property IQ - not all homes are measured on the same scale.  If the final sales price is much higher or lower than the list price, then it is more difficult to predict the price.  These homes will generate a higher IQ if you nail the price. For homes that are still on the market, we show you how you IQ is changing as the predictions flow in.  If you entered one of the early predictions on a home, make sure you check back to see how your prediction is standing up as more flow in.  If you were wondering how many predictions are flowing in - just check out these three homes in my profile - they have 115, 117 and 78 predictions respectively.  Now that's alot of insight into these three properties.  If you are wondering what the market things about the value of a home you are selling or buying.  Play it in the game (if it is on the market you can find the home by entering the address in the search bar on the home page), price it and then go to your profile and check out the predictions.  Want to see what others think - invite them to make a prediction. So there you have it. With the power of  the Price Me Now prediction market, you can finally get a sense of what the community thinks a house is worth.  Best of all, if you watch the predictions while the home is on the market, you can get a good sense if the property is properly priced.  Power to the community.  Price away!

The names make the story

The Stop Here Realty blog has an amusing post that weaves the names of various real estate web 2.0 companies into a funny post that addresses the relevant business questions for any software solution:

• How do I use these new solutions?
• How will my clients benefit?
• How will I benefit?
• Which ones should I invest in?
• Which functionality provides the best return?

The post, Understanding RE Web 2.0 - btw Where are my meds?, is worth the 2 minutes it will take to read if you are spending any of your time following the array of companies in this space.

You Call the Market

Today we launched our first Zillow-based real estate prediction market.  You can start playing the New York metro area at Predict.Realius.com. Across America experts are prognasticating about where we are in the real estate cycle.  We say - "You call the market".  So jump in and predict home prices for selected listings and Make Me Move properties from Zillow.com.  You can monitor how your predictions fare against others and ultimately the market when the home sells. Thanks to Zillow for creating an awesome developer API program that lets us build our game on top of their real estate information.

Calling all armchair agents

Cindy Zetts, who writes the Real Estate Deal for the Seattle Times, blogged about the Zip Realty version of Price Me Now.  She wants to know your IQ.  Her post, titled "Armchair agents, try this real-estate pricing game" is here.  She played 15 homes and got a 111 Property IQ.  She wants to know yours - head on over to her post and enter your IQ in the comment string.