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.
Congratulations to J. Richard Brewer from Algonquin, Illinois, the winner of the April Real Estate IQ contest sponsored by iHouseWeb running on the Price Me Now game site, iHousegames. Richard has been in the building trades industry for over 20 years and he had a three-year stint in the residential mortgage industry. For the past year, he has been a licensed Realtor with Coldwell Banker Primus.
When asked about his thoughts on the Price Me Now game, Richard was succinct and to the point -
“I love that game! It really helps keep me sharp!”.
A look at Richard’s player profile in the game shows that he really knows the Illinois market. He played 24 homes and had an IQ of 167 for the month of April.
It is not too late for you to play and win. iHouseweb is sponsoring a May contest. This time there are prizes for the top three places.
Drew Myers from Zillow sent me a note the other day to highlight a post on their forum:
It is titled “Who wants to play Guess the Price of That House?”
So I checked out the comment thread. Well, they are playing our game “Price Me Now” right there on the Zillow Forum. It is much more fun to play this game when you add a scoring model (Real Estate IQ), more pictures of the home, an interactive map and comparable sales data.
If you want to test your market knowledge and see how you stack up against the experts, give Price Me Now a spin. You can pick for a handful of locations right now from our homepage. There will be more locations – domestic and international – coming soon.
If you would like to add the game to your website, contact us at “info at realius.com” and we’ll see what we can arrange.
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!
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.
We have been sending out surveys asking folks on our mailing list where they would like to play real estate games. Here is a map showing some real estate markets around the globe that people are interested in playing.
View Larger Map
Zoom out and explore the map to see where else 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.
We launched our first Price Me Now sweepstakes today. The rules are simple – for every 25,000 points you get, you earn 1 entry in the sweepstakes with a maximum of 5 entries. The contest ends at midnight November 29. After we wait a few days for the mail in entries to arrive (it is the law), we will choose the winner. What do you win – $250 gift certificate to Amazon.com. Just in time for the holidays, Realius could stuff your stocking without hitting your wallet. Read the rules here.
Thanks to Susan Brady over at Redfin for telling her readers about our game in this post.
At the end of her post, Susan talks about the scoring in the game. She writes,
However, I did notice on two of the guesses that I was given 100% when my estimates were way off, so there may need to be some tweaking on this site.
We are looking to clear up any confusion about the scoring in the game. The object of the game is to guess what you think a home will sell for. As the game plays today, you’re not actually scored against how close your guess is to the List Price. The interface strongly suggests this, but that’s not the case. In fact, your accuracy is based on how close you are to the moving average of all of the user guesses. We call this the Realius Price, and you can see the RP in your player profile when you look at the house details.
When we started this project last year, one of the first real estate games that we found on the web was Mansion Impossible.
Built in the style of classic casual games, Mansion Impossible tests your multi-tasking capabilities as you go from block to block and try to buy low and sell high. If you don’t pay attention, you will miss the peak of the market and lose your money.
If only the real real estate market was as easy to read as the price signs in this game. In case you were wondering, this is not representative of what we are building at Realius.
While building Realius, we have been all over the Internet looking for great place-based games. One of my favorite is Geosense.
You get points for selecting the correct location of the city listed at the top of the page. You can play the World, Europe, or USA. Give it a shot alone, then play against someone. You better know your geography or else it is a bit embarrassing. It is fun, I promise.
This is not a requirement for success at Fantasy Real Estate, but knowing where Belfast, UK is located will impress your Irish friends.
Jay is Games has a good review of the game here.
