Realius

We were nominated for the Inman Innovation Award in the area of Web Services. We are in very good company with Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace, Krunching, Foreclosureradar and Estately.

Read more here.

This morning we launched Price Me Now, the real estate prediction game, in Cincinnati Ohio with our broker partner Comey-Shepherd. You can start predicting prices for homes in Cincinnati here.

This installation covers the entire Cincinnati Metro Area. You can get started by clicking on one of the top play location links or enter any address, zip code, neighborhood or landmark in the search bar. We’ll locate you on the map and serve up homes near this location for you to start pricing.

This is a great way to price homes near where you live or where you are looking to move. Price Me Now is the first real estate prediction market game that gives you an IQ - the Realius IQ - which is a measure of how well you know the market. If you are buying, selling or just watching the market, Price Me Now is the only place where you can test your market knowledge and get a real time read on what people are thinking about real estate prices. As the price predictions flow in, our patent pending learning algorithm cranks through the data to determine the Realius Price - the predicted sales price of the home based on the collective wisdom of the crowd.

I will be presenting about our revolutionary marketing and prediction market platform at the 7th Annual JMP Securities Research Conference tomorrow.  I will be joined by John Cunningham, our chief mathematician, who report on some of our early findings regarding the predictive qualities of our platform and player price estimates.  We are honored to be one of the few private companies that will be presenting at this distinguished conference.

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 J. Richard Brewer from Algonquin, Illinois, the winner of the April Real Estate IQ contest sponsored by iHouseWeb running on the Price Me Now game site, iHousegames. Richard has been in the building trades industry for over 20 years and he had a three-year stint in the residential mortgage industry. For the past year, he has been a licensed Realtor with Coldwell Banker Primus.

When asked about his thoughts on the Price Me Now game, Richard was succinct and to the point -

“I love that game! It really helps keep me sharp!”.

A look at Richard’s player profile in the game shows that he really knows the Illinois market. He played 24 homes and had an IQ of 167 for the month of April.

It is not too late for you to play and win. iHouseweb is sponsoring a May contest. This time there are prizes for the top three places.

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.