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 concept of the “wisdom of the crowds” popularized by James Surowiecki in his book Wisdom of the Crowds sets forth that the aggregation of information in groups, results in decisions that are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group.
We put the concept to the test once we launched our initial game, Price Me Now, in the Oakland/Berkeley portion of the San Francisco Bay Area. We developed a pricing algorithm that addressed the unique aspects of real estate - that is, real estate is hyper local. You might be good at pricing one market, but know little about values in another.
Once the sales data started to flow in, we ran the player home price estimates through the Realius Pricing Opinon (RPO) algorithm and compared the results to the actual sales price of a sample of homes to see how good our algorithm could predict the true value of a home. We compared the RPO results to other prices - the list price, automated valuation model (AVM) prices and the simple average of the player price estimates.
We found that the moves submitted by the community playing the Price Me Now game, when run through the RPO, was on average 24% better at estimating final sales price then the List Price, 116% better than a public AVM and 260% better than the simple average.
These are early, yet promising results. We are continuing to test the algorithm with more data and actual sales. Stay tuned for more results. Better yet, jump into the game test your pricing prowess and be part of the best real estate pricing community.
We know we are not the first to apply wisdom of the crowds to real estate. Joel over at Future of Real Estate Marketing covered the debut of MyCurrency last year.
The twist that we have taken is to provide excellent information about the home and the market so that the players are educated when they make their guess. We also put some sport into the process by suppressing the list price until you make your guess. We do think that our game paradigm is great way to let real estate players have fun, learn the market and show off their real estate IQ.
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.
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.
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 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!