Realius

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.

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.