ziprealty.com Introduces Realius Community Estimator
December 16, 2008 by Emma Sorensen
US brokerage firm ziprealty.com, which came number 4 in terms of market share for real estate websites in the latest November Hitwise figures, has taken a big step forward and introduced community estimating technology to its website.
There’s no doubt it is going to be a controversial application, but also one with a lot of potential for revolutionalising the sales process and the experience of users browsing properties online.
The technology is courtesy of a company called Realius, who describe it as a price prediction widget, with read-write capabilities and user state management, making it more complex than most data widgets you see on real estate websites. Realius were also responsible for real estate pricing games that hit the market earlier this year.
Basically, it will mean that any user can note what they think any ziprealty.com listing is worth, and any other user will be able to see what others have said the listing is worth. The technology makes the sales process quite transparent, showing what people really think a property’s value is.
The application joins of host of others that ziprealty.com have embraced for their 1.3 million home listings. They were the first to include one-click driving directions to multiple homes, have extensive neighbourhood and school data, home sale data and satellite images of properties.
geekestateblog.com reminded us that Ziprealty launched a “Price Me Now” sub domain back in July, but the introduction of the Realius technology has taken it a step further, allowing anyone to predict a price, and linking it directly to the listing.
It makes propertyportalwatch.com wonder what the community pricing technology’s scope might be – will other brokerages or property portals be keen to introduce a similar function?
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Community input is here in news (Digg, etc.), products reviews (Amazon), and many other things. It should be a core part of real estate search. We are the ones buying the homes, so our opinion about price is totally relevant. I think what Zip and Realius launched is very cool! Why should we suppress community input on pricing. Let the price predictions roll in. What do you think?
Michael
Perhaps the weakness is that input could be mischievously entered by people
not remotely interested in the property.
Even well-meant opinions by people not in the buying phase would skew the predictions and lead genuine buyers to be well away from the mark with their offer.
I think it may cloud the issue of price on properties that attracted only one or two predictions.
It may also be manipulated by the vendor and/or their friends.
John:
The algorithm protects against the issue you raise by using an “authority” model to weight the relative strength of predictions.
If you think of it as a tool for those in the market that want to get comfortable with neighborhood prices, it works great even if there is only one prediction (mine). It lets me record what I think the home is worth and then let’s me know how close I was to the sales price when it sells.
Chuck