Thursday, December 18, 2008

Fun and Games With Real Estate

The news in the Real Estate sector has been pretty glum, so how about some fun and games to lighten up the week. For those readers that think that they know the Real Estate market, ZipRealty is now giving you an opportunity to prove it by testing your ability to price homes. Once you put in a guess, the site gives you an IQ score that is based on the community. You do have to be a registered user, to see the homes photos. (See the "Predict this sale price of this home" box on the right side of first photo; second photo: scoring page)

 

For those who read our local Knife Catchers blog, this is a must to check out. See the latest post about the house on Marina. I tried the Maria property on the price game, My IQ was 18. I was the third person and someone guessed over the list and two of us guessed in the $800K range. The more guesses that come in closer to us will raise the player IQ.

I think that the most interesting part is how the community can start a trend of identifying over priced homes or good values in the market. ZipRealty had an earlier version of the game and Myron Lo in a written statement said that they learned community gets pretty close.

 “Another big discovery for us was that the ZIP community price predictions were becoming great predictors of what homes would actually sell for (in many instances),” said Lo.

“The overall feedback from our customers was great. In addition to making real estate a little more fun, our customers appreciated the extra price opinion they would get with the ‘ZIP Community Price’. The biggest suggestion they had for us was to integrate our community pricing more tightly with our main website so that they’d be able to see price predictions for the specific homes they were interested in.”

The community along with the estimating tools on the ZipRealty website gives buyers something to review before they buy. More than anything it gives us who follow this something to do at our desk besides playing Sudoku or Solitaire.

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