Realius

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.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

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.

Price Me Now, the real estate prediction market, launched with our Australian Partner RP Data last week.  Currently you can price homes in Sydney and Brisbane.  We will be adding more markets shortly.

You can find cool homes in magical areas like Bondi Beach by going to http://propertyiq.com.au and searching.  We’ll find the homes nearby that are on the market and you can start learning the Australian real estate market and building your PropertyIQ.

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: