The best thing about going to Real Estate Connect in San Francisco is meeting up with all the innovative tech folks trying to streamline the real estate industry for agents and, ultimately, consumers.
Yeah, Zillow and Trulia were once one of them.
They dangle and display their wares for the media. One of the most exciting innovators I interviewed last week was Tom Horvath, CEO and founder of Tumlis. Tumlis is a Bay-area brokerage that provides free lead generation and customer relationship management services to agents. Tumlis also just released a really great home pricing module called REALizer — a groundbreaking, proprietary real estate dashboard that agents can use with clients to accurately price homes and analyze market timing, among other things.
“Real Estate is all about efficiency and progress,” says Tom. “We’ve built a platform of services which serves that.”
And here’s how on-target REALizer’s home pricing is: in one market, overall REALizer pricing estimates were $2.15 million higher than Zillow, and $1.45 higher than Trulia. Finally, accurate data!
“The reason for our accuracy is that we don’t utilize a broad range of sold data as comparable,” says Tom. “We segment the data and ask the user (the agent) to provide qualitative and conditional attributes. No other AVM that I am aware of does this.”
The REALizer then selects the the properties in the specific area most similar to the one being researched. This is how REALizer provides much more accurate value estimates with a large enough sample size.
Tom Horvath comes to the business with boots on the ground: he has been a top selling residential and commercial broker in the San Francisco Bay Area for 35 years. His main head-scratcher was how to efficiently price homes and judge market worth on a local level but on a mass basis, and of course at a low cost. His solution: Tumlis’ REALizer, which has been in the works for three years, though the idea first incubated in 1996. REALizer, he says, will help agents accurately figure the value of a home, how soon a buyer or seller should take action, how long a property will remain on the market at a certain price, how a home’s price is influenced by days on the market.
It can even gauge the future popularity of a neighborhood!
I told Tom REALizer sounds like the Great Wizard of Oz. He called it a state- of- the- art predicative analytics tool. Using the REALizer helps sellers instantly gauge market demand and forecast a listing’s contract price and expected days on the market based on numerous real-time input factors. The REALizer platform plus a package of CRM tools, social media help, auto email marketing will be offered to agents at an estimated release price of $9.95 a month or so.
“We are going to make our money with a product that has real value, NOT by holding the real estate agents hostage,” says Tom.
As every seasoned agent, seller or appraiser knows, a home’s worth is determined by comparing to relevant comparable properties. That’s an art that most AVMs fail, probably because they base on only one algorithm. REALizer uses 12, data like prices of recently sold homes, asking prices from multiple listing services, and other sources, plus average asking and sold prices of similar homes with a minimum of four to five others in the neighborhood. It shows how many similar properties are currently for sale and their average days on market. But here’s a huge kicker: REALizer also collects agent input. Agents rate a target property’s location and views, the condition of its interior and the state of its exterior on a four-tier scale.
The REALizer engine churns and compares the home.
Agents interpret and explain the data to sellers, giving clients a pure statistical analysis of where their home fits into the market, how aggressively they should be pricing it, all based, and tweaked, on each seller’s individual needs.
“The question all sellers have: if I sell, where do I price for the best selling price and how long shall I expect to sell it,” says Tom. “Now I can answer them. We have acquired data never before acquired and run it through a patent pending process.”
Oh by the way, this works for buyers, too, Says Tom.
By using a slider bar within the tool, on line, agents can fine tune their qualitative assessment of a home. The estimates even come with a four-star confidence rating that rates it’s own comps.
Tom Horvath calls this data “the crown jewel” of REALizer: buyer, seller and agent insights from the analytics engine are fed into the platform for each property. Those insights rate the home’s market status, where the market should turn in relation to the home and the comps, and tell the user whether its a buyer or seller’s market.
So is this just another new-fangled Automatic Valuational Model? No, says Tom. His product allows a consumer to make a true price discovery with multiple adjustments. The REALizer estimates asking price, selling price and days on market for a total set of relevant comparable homes, without cherry-picking. Soon, he hopes to add historic models with data dating back 20 years to further fine tune the tool’s accuracy.
Here’s what I really like: with the data input, Tumlis will soon be able to conduct detailed analyses of property attributes that affect a home’s selling price and days on market: higher ceilings sell faster than low? Bigger kitchens over larger masters? I can hardly wait!
Currently Tumlis released its new mousetrap in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and the North San Francisco Bay Area, but has plans to expand nationwide including North Texas. The company will work as a brokerage in each live market, but represent buy-side investors only. He hopes to be in Dallas by next April.
The new predictive analytics tool also provides chart-based visualizations for several indices for the previous year for comparable homes including price changes, market activity levels and inventory levels. Tumlis also provides a prediction of where each index is headed over the next several months.
Tumlis uses inventory as a predictor of velocity and velocity as a predictor of price, said Chris Butler, Tumlis’ chief operating officer. Watch out, Case-Shiller!
