Realius

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!

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.

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.

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 are happy to announce that Lance Johnson of Tracy, California won a $250 gift certificate to amazon.com in our first sweepstakes. Here is a photo of Lance and his daughter Kylee:

Lance told us that he didn’t waste any time in using his gift certificate in this holiday buying season. The sweepstakes ran between November 21st and November 30th. Over the course of that week, 275 players were automatically entered into the sweepstakes by accumulating 25,000 or more points while one person wrote in via ’snail mail’. We would like to give special shout out to the top two point earners ‘Eric’ and ‘Shapan78′ for earning 3.1 million and 2.9 million points respectively. Great work!

We have a sweepstakes going on now that will end on New Year’s Eve. The winner will receive a $250 amazon.com gift certificate. Head to Realius.com to play. Once you accrue 25,000 points, you will be automatically entered to win. We will announce the winner in January.

Are any of you wondering where Tracy, California is? Google maps are great:

View Larger Map

Our game was covered by Mike Pegg over at Google Maps Mania on November 22nd. Mike’s post, like others, warn about the addictive nature of the game. Once you start, the challenge of nailing the price gets your competitive juices flowing.

Happy Geography Awareness Week! Thanks to Ronald Reagan, the third week in November is Geography Awareness Week. At this point in the post, it is only fair for me to disclose that I was a geography major. Over the past few years, tools like Google Maps and Google Earth have made geographic information available and meaningful to the masses on an unprecedented scale. Everyday there are new mashups to check out. Keep your eye on Google Maps Mania to see the latest and greatest Google Maps mashups. Get involved yourself at Geocommons.com, where you can upload geographic data, make and share maps. If you have a gripe with a neighbor and you’d like get that off your chest, head over to Rotten Neighbor where you can upload rants about neighbors to their exact residences on a map. If you would like to see hyper-local news by browsing a map, check out Yourstreet.com.

We recognize the integral role that spatial and economic context plays in the valuation of real estate. When asking a player what she thinks a home is worth in our first game, we provide price points of local, recent comparable sales. We put that data in a geographic context by mapping the locations of those recent sales. Check out a screenshot from the game. Each comparable sale in the table is show as a red house on the map.

Click here try out the game in the Oakland/Berkely area of Northern California!

We were on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad. Here is the coverage from O’Reilly Radar. We were the youngest company in the group and the only one that has yet to launch. At the show, we announced that we will be launching our first public game in the Oakland/Berkeley area in the next couple weeks.

We were pleased to be selected Most Creative Idea - here are the four awards:

The voting was crowd applause-based and it was neck and neck between Realius and Spice Works for the most creative idea award.  It was an honor to be selected to present on the Launchpad with the other companies.

Realius to unleash Fantasy Real Estate™ at TechCrunch40 conference

Reality based game company to demo its online real estate application to technology industry elite

BERKELEY, CA (September 14, 2007) – Realius, Inc. announced today that it will demo its Fantasy Real Estate™ application – a suite of web-based casual games that follow consumers throughout the homeownership lifecycle – at the TechCrunch40 Conference. TechCrunch40 will gather the world’s most influential technology experts, investors and startups on September 17th and 18th at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

“Realius captures the synergies between the enormous popular interest in casual gaming and Americans’ obsession with real estate,” said Realius CEO Chuck Teller “Our games engage consumers as they dream about, search for, buy, furnish, remodel and sell their homes in ways that are incredibly fun – but also instructive.”

Realius will allow conference attendees to play its flagship game, Price Me Now™, which challenges players to guess the price of homes for sale in their market, on the show floor. Price Me Now™ evaluates player guesses and awards points based on their performance against the “Realius” price, an aggregate combination of previous player price estimates and the actual list price. Real estate companies and professionals can purchase placement in the game as “coaches” who guide players and make their own professional price guesses.

“Games like Realius’s Price Me Now™ game draw on the core human emotions of places and things we aspire to,” said Richard Tait, Cranium Grand Poo Bah. Tait, an advisor to Realius, continues, “Fantasy Real Estate™ lets me imagine what it might be like to buy or sell a home in my neighborhood or a dream house in the mountains. This experience captures the imagination and passion of the player while providing a sticky business model proposition, and that is the perfect match in today’s entertainment world.”

Scott Kucirek, general manager of Prudential California Realty, one of the nation’s largest real estate companies, says “Real estate brokerages are struggling to connect with consumers online and Realius has the potential to solve that problem.” Kucirek continues, “Realius games are entertaining, addictive and educational for consumers but also provide companies in our industry with an entirely new way to think about customer engagement.”

Other Realius games forthcoming include Fantasy Flip™, which lets homeowners get community insight for various improvements they make by modifying photos of their homes, and Major League Investor™, which pits players against one another as they build fantasy portfolios.