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.
Only one person wins the monthly sweepstakes, but now everyone can win by playing Price Me Now. Today we rolled out a new perk for Realius game players - we call them Real Deals. As you play the game and collect points, we present you with deals on home improvement items that we have assembled from across the Internet. Your “Deal Level” - bronze, silver or gold, is reset at the beginning of each month. Play a few homes and you’ll be in the bronze level.
Look for your deal level on your player card as shown below.
Player Card on the Game Page
To see and redeem your deals, go to your Player Profile - Players –> My Profile and a we show you your top three deals.
Your Player Profile Page
To see all the deals, select See All Deals. Make sure you come back regularly as we are adding new deals all the time.
Real Deals Page
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.
Fox Business News came out with nice article featuring Realius today titled Fantasy Real Estate Game Lets You Play Realtor.
Here is an excerpt:
Just like the Price is Right, but for real estate, Realius lets you guess the value of houses on the market in the East Bay area of California. Realius is working with Red Oak Realty to provide the listings and data, but hopes to expand its fantasy real estate game beyond California to the rest of the country.
In case you missed it, Realius was mentioned in the November 29th Economist.
Check out the article, American House Prices: Fantasy or Phobia?
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
Published real estate market data is typically a few months old. To fill this void of up-to-date market data, Altos Research and Real IQ have launched a monthly report looking at the major metropolitan statistical areas of the US. Altos’ report analyzes repeat sales of single-family homes. New construction, condominiums and town homes are not included in their analysis.
The December report is available for free here. This report shows that ‘Days on Market’ continues to increase in Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
This increase in Days on Market is an indicator of the market’s ability to absorb inventory. Growth in inventory and Days on Market will most likely continue to push prices down.
The New York Times published a very interesting article last Sunday titled When the Price Isn’t Right written by Peter Goodman.
Goodman writes about the current failure of traditional valuation methodologies and how the resulting uncertainty is slowing the economy.
The global financial system is struggling with tight credit in part because markets are unwilling to buy many of the exotic assets sitting on the books of banks. These assets are linked one way or another to mortgages, their value riding on the ability of homeowners to keep making their payments. With house prices falling and foreclosures increasing, few can be sure what these assets are worth, making the current state of banking something like a poker game in which no one knows how many face cards are in the deck. It adds up to an incentive not to play.
With the real estate market in such a tumultuous state, comparable sales, typically a lynchpin of real estate valuation can not be relied upon to predict future real estate values. ‘Price Me Now’ is one of the few places where you can voice your opinion on the future sales prices of homes and see how your guess compares to other people’s guesses. We hope playing this game will help reduce some of the uncertainty in the market for our players.
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.
