There in lies the beauty of the lazi-fare free market with no regulation on pricing, prices go up in high-demand areas, and remain low in lower demand areas. While a home in San Francisco may be valued at $11 million the same home sitting on a chunk of land near Des Moines, Iowa would sell for far less. The Value… ultimately is in the land, not the structure, and I’m sure anyone living in such a rural state would think homes in San Francisco are exorbitantly priced. So, depending on input and where their bias lies, this site will only reflect the input of people interested in it.

There seems to be concern that we haven’t thought through the gaming aspect of using markets. Let me just say, I have been a derivatives trader for 15 years and Vice Chairman of the Pacific Exchange (now part of the NYSE) and so gaming is front and center for anyone in the financial markets – its called, among other things, ‘painting the tape’, ‘cornering the market’ and ‘insider trading’. History is filled with these stories so this is nothing new and I have experienced all of these first hand. This is largely why there are regulations in the financial markets via the SEC, CFTC and others.

My-Currency does have anti-gaming algorithms in place but they are turned OFF because we want to observe behavior during our Alpha period. Long-term, we believe that if My-Currency can grow a large and diverse enough community, we won’t need anti-gaming algorithms because price inefficiencies (prices manipulated to achieve some real world outcome) will be exploited by people who have opposing incentives or those who are motivated by or aspire to achieve reputation. The best thing that can happen, if you are trying to make your mark within the community, is to hunt down prices that are misaligned with reality and bring them back into line – and therefore earn community status (reputation currency).

Bottom line: Will there be gaming? Yes - even the financial markets observe this. Can gaming be managed? Yes – explicitly through our algorithms and organically through community. Can markets get it wrong? Yes but the question is whether markets will outperform individuals over time (the answer is yes).

For a fuller post of my thoughts, please go to http://www.my-currency.com/blogs/karim/

Having said all this, we have a lot of work to do get the model right which is why we have limited our launch to San Francisco during this public alpha. Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

My-Currency.com launched this week to much fanfare. The idea is to generate home values using crowd intelligence. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, yea. RealtyBaron launched its version of crowdsourcing back in 2004 (before the word ‘crowds…

Best Buy II, the newly launched chain will “make up” for this anomaly and guarantee to sell something to every store visitor.

Seriously, I just see a bunch of fighting and trying to game the system… not really any value for buyers or sellers. I mean seriously, who’s going to push down the value of their neighborhood? And who isn’t going to push up the value of their own house?

http://www.raincityguide.com/2.....20-company

also, how do they rank people on accuracy? doesnt this assume the house is either sold or appraised for real, and that the site learns the true figures?

That was exactly what I was thinking- even 1 out of 20 isn’t bad for such a large commission.

Say Mr. A is looking for a house then this site could be absolutely vital - once Mr A. has purchased his house you think he would be still blogging/contributing to it.

To me it seems its a Space for Estate agents which obviously is a smaller niche

We’ll see though, it could really take off and prove us all wrong.

Just wondering is there any added security built in the site, like remembering the IP address or spam filters?

If that is true - 2 out of 3 don’t produce a sale, does that mean that 1 out of 3 does produce a sale? Not a bad closing ratio for a business that pays 6% (or whatever % of) on the sale.