Realius

We were nominated for the Inman Innovation Award in the area of Web Services. We are in very good company with Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace, Krunching, Foreclosureradar and Estately.

Read more here.

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.

Xavier Vespa of Hyve Up came to the office last week and put together an excellent video interview about Realius.

You can check out other Web 2.0 interviews at Hyve Up.

Recently, the January S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indexes for 20 cities were released, painting a grim picture for all markets except Charlotte, North Carolina. Overall, the 20-city price index was down 10.7 percent from the year before. Las Vegas and Miami were hit worst reporting 19.3 percent drops. Charlotte, N.C. was the sole winner, growing by 1.8 percent from January 2007 to January 2008.

Would you like to see Charlotte real estate for yourself? Today for the first time you can get in the market by guessing future sale prices of homes throughout North Carolina, Arizona & Illinois in ‘Price Me Now’. Head over to http://ihousegames.realius.com to play!

Play throughout North Carolina:

Price hundreds of listings throughout Charlotte’s seven play regions:

Check out Arizona and Illinois as well:

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.

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

We have continued to ask people signing up to our mailing list where they would like to play real estate games. California is clearly a hot spot of interest. Here is a map of California, zoom in to see what markets that people are interested in playing.

View Larger Map

Zoom out and explore other areas people would like to play! Head on over to Realius.com to sign up for the mailing list so you can tell us where you would like to play.