Even as the housing market goes south, real-estate Websites continue to soldier on. On Tuesday, after a year in beta, CyberHomes will launch officially and join a crowded field that includes Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, and Realtor.com. “Even as the housing market has slid,” argues CyberHomes CEO Marty Frame, “the audience online is at an all-time high and growing. I think the basic story here is that you can only access people through their concerns – and there are a lot of concerns out there.” As the former chief technology officer of Realtor.com, Frame is only too aware of how attitudes towards real estate have shifted over the past few years.
Like many other sites, CyberHomes allows homeowners and prospective purchasers to assess the value of particular properties, as well as general market conditions. For any property, you can see a list of comparable homes and how much they sold for. A new modular dashboard (based on Microsoft’s Silverlight) will personalize the homepage to each visitor’s preferences. There are also useful heat maps that show housing trends for a given city or region at a glance. Here is a heat map, for instance, of home prices in Silicon Valley (the redder the area, the more expensive the homes):
And here is a heat map for the same area showing thepercentage change in prices this year (blue indicates a slight decline, and green is flat):
But what exactly makes CyberHomes any different from the dozen other real-estate Websites out there? (After all, Trulia has heat maps). Frame says his data is better.
Yes, we have heard this before. (Zillow Zestimate, anyone?). But CyberHomes may actually have an advantage here in that it is owned by Fidelity National Financial, one of the biggest title-insurance companies in the country. As such, Fidleity National Financial has a direct view on every home transaction in the country. “The key differentiators on the data is that we are the primary aggregator of it.,” says Frame. Other than the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that brokers use, any company that wants information on properties sold, home ownership, or mortgage issuance needs to license it from one of two sources: either Fidelity National Financial or First American (which is where Zillow gets its data, through an intermediary company called Dataquick). Since CyberHomes has a direct line into the Fidelity National Financial database, Frame argues that the data on his site is updated in a more timely fashion for the 100 million U.S. property records it covers. And it will begin to include actual MLS data as well, beginning in the first quarter of next year.
Anecdotally, CyberHomes was at least able to locate the building I live in, whereas Zillow could not. However, I am pretty sure CyberHome’s estimate of my apartment’s value is off the mark (by as much as 30 percent). This could be because CyberHomes does not have much information about my apartment other than its location and square footage. Of course, I can make adjustments with different sliders to better reflect local market conditions, as well as the condition of my apartment. This gets the price into the right ballpark. But if the price of my house is wrong, how can I trust any of the other estimates? So I guess I am still waiting for the perfect real-estate site to come along. Until then, the CyberHomes heat maps are pretty good real-estate porn.
When it comes to Real Estate web services targeted at consumers, the trick is always pushing the data around in a way that makes sense to consumers. I like the idea of Cyberhomes, but the interface feels (from the screenshots) to be really heavy.
Considering it was put together by an Insurance company, this isn’t terribly surprising. Sometimes it’s not how much information your system has, but how you present it. I fear that Cyberhomes does not do this in a way that will “feel” useful for normal people.
I’ll take a longer look and see if that changes.
Zillow: $634K
Cyberhomes: 1.4m
Actual worth is probably around 700K so its strange that its giving 2x the price
I’m having a flashback.
I was the design director for the very first major real estate site. It was created for Moore Data Services (they ran a large percentage of the MLS services) and was intended first for MSN (1995?) and was redone as a website in 1996. It was called CyberHomes. It had MLS listings as well as full mapping of properties and community highlights. Was sold to Microsoft (1998?). I think I still have a copy of the logo somewhere.
Real estate web services is really the new trend in internet marketing lately. Its great to be reading much about it these days.
as people are moving from TV to Internet, Internet become mode of advertisement and easy reach so why not real estate industries take advanage of it, as many people 1st try to search on internet
will it show homes that are on fire like in CA
I apologize, i just read my comment and it came out wrong, i meant is it like a live satellite, where you can see things current like the fires around here in los angeles. i’m sorry if i offended anyone.
They do have a nice interface for people who know what they are doing and it is absolutely correct that they have very good data. But there are other good data providers out there that will sell you the data like DataQuick, First American and Stewart. For the average person looking to find a home for sale and interested in home values http://www.Homekeys.net has been doing it better long before the Zillow and Cyberhomes websites even existed. They have a powerful but simple search tool that gives you all the information an average home buyer needs. The problem is that they only service Florida right now. I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too.
I just checked for my house and couldn’t believe how clear the photo is and I love the fact that they zoom in on it! Pricing seems a little more generous then zillow so I guess I like this site better ha ha ha!
It is giving 2X price. My home might be worth 150K and it shows up as 290K.
Sucks !! Sorry bad data. The house across my home is valued lower than mine when it is twice the size of my house
N
I just made a 2 minute video spoofing that Google just purchased Zillow, perhaps I should have included CyberHomes.
No support for Safari. (sigh)
The last data audit I did had First American @ 92.8% coverage (by % of US counties), Fidelity @ 40.1%, DataQuick @ 27.2%.
Their data may get updated better for certain locales (which arguably are the harder counties anyhow), but in my estimation Zillow should still have the better US reach.
There’s something like 10 or so states that are called “non disclosure” – I would love to see a company like Fidelity or Zillow go into those states and do some lobbying for better access to sales history.
I have never, ever, in my entire life, come across a site as awful as this. This is yet another real estate startup that totally do not get it. They absolutely fail to take into consideration what is most important. Their data is completely screwed, but even if it were accurate, it still wouldn’t help them. Clumsy, shoddy, crappy. Deadpool within 12 months.
Nick
Disclosure: We do real estate listings.
sad that they dont support my browser….
Erik –
FYI – Dataquick is not Zillow’s only (commercial) data-source. Also, not to speak for DQ, but from my understanding, their offering is not well described as an intermediary of First American’s.
When discussing real estate data sources, it’s important to remember that almost a million homeowners have claimed their homes on Zillow and updated the facts about their homes. This is an extremely rich data source, unique to Zillow.
Cyberhomes is not even worth using for home valuation in my experience. Zillow is better at giving a rough estimate. All websites still have a problem with similar homes that have better views, proximity to busy streets, and other things that affect prices dramatically.
I had my house officially appraised for 500k during a refinance. Cyberhomes had it valued at 350k. Zillow was more accurate at 480k.