The gorgeous rolling hills of the California Central Coast is one of the loveliest places in the Golden State. William Randolf Hearst knew it, so he built Hearst Castle. Many others discovered the white sand beaches of Cayucos or the world’s best farmers market in the city of San Luis Obsipo. Once America saw the Acadamy Award winning film, Sideways, millions discovered the excellent wine and beautiful scenery of the Central Coast.
Now, in association with SLOhomestore.com, Realius is pleased to announce the opening of our second Fantasy Real Estate market - San Luis Obispo. If you are already registered to play Price Me Now, you can use your same username and password to start playing. Good luck pricing this area. And if you see the home of your dreams, our friends at SLOhomestore are ready to help you make your fantasy a reality.
Last week, Zillow released boundary files for over 7,000 neighborhoods throughout the US. Previously Zillow had provided neighborhood demographic data via its GetDemographics API but had not provided boundary definitions of neighborhoods. It didn’t take Andrew Mattie of Diverse Solutions long to build this great mashup with Google Maps and Zillow’s data.
Defining neighborhoods is a tricky undertaking. I took a class in high school titled, ‘The Urbanization of San Francisco’. I clearly remember our first homework assignment. We were tasked to draw maps of our neighborhoods. People came to class with wildly diverse maps, in both detail and scale. Some folks thought of their neighborhoods as very small areas while others thought of their neighborhoods as much larger and less detailed. This exercise got us to examine our cognitives maps and how we think about the spaces we live in.
San Francisco’s SFGIS site provides two sets of neighborhood boundary files for the City, one from the San Francisco Association of Realtors and one from the Department of City Planning. As you might imagine, the realtors break the City down to many more neighborhoods than Department of City Planning does. By exploring Andrew’s mashup I realized that Zillow uses the Department of City Planning neighborhood boundary files instead of the San Francisco Association of Realtors boundary files. Here is a map of San Francisco’s Planning neighborhoods:
An example of a neighborhood missing from Zillow’s boundary files is Cow Hollow. Trulia divides San Francisco into the neighborhoods defined by the San Francisco Association of Realtors. This screenshot shows the Trulia boundaries for the Marina, Cow Hollow and Pacific Heights.
How do you define your neighborhood?
We were happy to learn today that the real estate social network, ActiveRain will receive $2.75 million in Series A funding. Congratulations Matt & Jonathan!
For those of you who don’t know, ActiveRain is home to a vibrant network of blogging real estate agents. ActiveRain plans to use this new funding to drive product development. We look forward to seeing the results!
Congratulations to Irishman Rory “Carmillionaire” Carmody for winning a $250 Amazon.com gift certificate in the December Sweepstakes!
Rory is 23 and earned his nickname “Carmillionaire” from his friends for being obsessed with business. He recently graduated from University and has just started his real estate career with small development firm in Dublin. Rory tells us that he enjoys evaluating properties in a market that he is completely unfamiliar with and that the speed and simplicity of ‘Price Me Now’ makes it fun to play.
Great job Carmillionaire!
The winner of the December sweepstakes has just been chosen! While we’re waiting to hear back from the winner, let’s look at some numbers from the December sweepstakes:
530 players accrued more than 25,000 points and were entered into the sweepstakes,
24,491 price guesses were submitted by these players, and
4,045 was the average points per guess by all entered players
We would like to congratulate player Qstar for not winning the sweepstakes, but being an absolutely incredible price guesser. Of the 530 players entered in the sweepstakes, Qstar ranked 15th in average points per price guess with 4,547. What is amazing is that Qstar managed this high average with 499 price guesses! Nobody else in the top 50 of average points per guess had more than 300 guesses!
Stay tuned, we will announce the winner shortly.
Only one person wins the monthly sweepstakes, but now everyone can win by playing Price Me Now. Today we rolled out a new perk for Realius game players - we call them Real Deals. As you play the game and collect points, we present you with deals on home improvement items that we have assembled from across the Internet. Your “Deal Level” - bronze, silver or gold, is reset at the beginning of each month. Play a few homes and you’ll be in the bronze level.
Look for your deal level on your player card as shown below.
Player Card on the Game Page
To see and redeem your deals, go to your Player Profile - Players –> My Profile and a we show you your top three deals.
Your Player Profile Page
To see all the deals, select See All Deals. Make sure you come back regularly as we are adding new deals all the time.
Real Deals Page