Realius

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.

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!

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.

This morning we launched Price Me Now, the real estate prediction game, in Cincinnati Ohio with our broker partner Comey-Shepherd. You can start predicting prices for homes in Cincinnati here.

This installation covers the entire Cincinnati Metro Area. You can get started by clicking on one of the top play location links or enter any address, zip code, neighborhood or landmark in the search bar. We’ll locate you on the map and serve up homes near this location for you to start pricing.

This is a great way to price homes near where you live or where you are looking to move. Price Me Now is the first real estate prediction market game that gives you an IQ – the Realius IQ – which is a measure of how well you know the market. If you are buying, selling or just watching the market, Price Me Now is the only place where you can test your market knowledge and get a real time read on what people are thinking about real estate prices. As the price predictions flow in, our patent pending learning algorithm cranks through the data to determine the Realius Price – the predicted sales price of the home based on the collective wisdom of the crowd.

The concept of the “wisdom of the crowds” popularized by James Surowiecki in his book Wisdom of the Crowds sets forth that the aggregation of information in groups, results in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.

We put the concept to the test once we launched our initial game, Price Me Now, in the Oakland/Berkeley portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. We developed a pricing algorithm that addressed the unique aspects of real estate – that is, real estate is hyper local. You might be good at pricing one market, but know little about values in another.

Once the sales data started to flow in, we ran the player home price estimates through the Realius Pricing Opinon (RPO) algorithm and compared the results to the actual sales price of a sample of homes to see how good our algorithm could predict the true value of a home. We compared the RPO results to other prices – the list price, automated valuation model (AVM) prices and the simple average of the player price estimates.

We found that the moves submitted by the community playing the Price Me Now game, when run through the RPO, was on average 24% better at estimating final sales price then the List Price, 116% better than a public AVM and 260% better than the simple average.

These are early, yet promising results. We are continuing to test the algorithm with more data and actual sales. Stay tuned for more results. Better yet, jump into the game test your pricing prowess and be part of the best real estate pricing community.

We know we are not the first to apply wisdom of the crowds to real estate. Joel over at Future of Real Estate Marketing covered the debut of MyCurrency last year.

The twist that we have taken is to provide excellent information about the home and the market so that the players are educated when they make their guess. We also put some sport into the process by suppressing the list price until you make your guess. We do think that our game paradigm is great way to let real estate players have fun, learn the market and show off their real estate IQ.