The Stop Here Realty blog has an amusing post that weaves the names of various real estate web 2.0 companies into a funny post that addresses the relevant business questions for any software solution:
- How do I use these new solutions?
- How will my clients benefit?
- How will I benefit?
- Which ones should I invest in?
- Which functionality provides the best return?
The post, Understanding RE Web 2.0 - btw Where are my meds?, is worth the 2 minutes it will take to read if you are spending any of your time following the array of companies in this space.
We are now live with Price Me Now in association with our first national real estate partner, Zip Realty.
You can find a link to the game on their home page:
And once you login, you will see the banner on the property search and home detail page, shown below.
You can currently play in three metro areas: Boston, Seattle and San Francisco. You can start by choosing one of the Top Play Locations or enter an address in the search bar (if it is in one of these three metro areas).
The game is predicated on players predicting the sales price of homes on the market. As more predictions flow in, we will let you know how your predictions compare to others in the market. Once the home sells and the sales price is available in the public records, we will let you know how you compare against the market.
So, now you can track home prices near where you live, in your favorite neighborhood or where you want to live some day. By participating in the game, you will test your knowledge, learn where the market is going and have fun in the process.
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.
While at the Inman Real Estate Connect Conference in New York at the beginning of 2008, Joel Burslem interviewed me about Realius. The interview covers the company vision and early results from our beta site. You can watch the interview here.
Marc over at 1000watt Consulting embraces innovation with an open mind. In his blog post the other day title The pot of gold at the end of real estate’s rainbow coalition, he points out the various innovations that have been brought to the real estate industry from “outsiders”. In defining the Rainbow Coaltion, Marc states:
One could argue that in the 90’s, the first wave of Internet invaders were made up of dot-com rustlers looking to wrangle consumers away from the traditional real estate coral. By 2002 - high noon - most if not all them were gunned down or run out of town.
Today the landscape sparkles, augmented by a beautiful rainbow forming over yonder. It’s comprised of a pantone chart of vendors, bloggers, thinkers and innovators with new perspectives, deep intelligence and wonderfully fresh offerings. You know some of them — Joel, Dustin , Seth — who join with many others like Jessie, Chuck and other new entrants with cool, new, engaging ideas.
Real estate today. It’s a rainbow coalition of outsiders, insiders, consumers, MBAs, college students, Americans and friends abroad all participating in the construction of a new real estate experience. Not only for themselves, but for everyone.
We’re honored to be part of Marc’s coalition.
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 same drive we have to guess the price of a home, also drives us to wonder what would $2 million get us in a Colorado ski town, D.C. suburb or the paradise of Arizona. You can play that fantasy game in the New York Times Real Estate Section.
Check out the great photos here.
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 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.
Here in the gourmet ghetto of North Berkeley we share office space with two other great startups, Sungevity & Sustainable Agriculture Education. People coming and going from Sungevity and Sage often stop by and ask us what we’re working on. The second question we most often hear is, “So you’re like Second Life?”
Real estate in Second Life does not exist in real life! The real estate you will find in Realius games is real. You will be able to see a house in our games and then go check out that house in a real life Sunday open house. Our games are built upon real life real estate in the same vein that Fantasy Baseball is built upon real baseball players’ statistics.
Second Life is a virtual, immersive 3D world where all sorts of things can happen. Second Life is not necessarily a game. Realius is different in that we are creating 2D real estate games.
One of our goals at Realius is to allow players to express and explore their aspirations in a social and fun way without the constraint of money. In this way we are somewhat similar to Second Life.
