Property Pages
A lot of the improvements we have been working on Homethinking in recent months had to do with the Realtor side of things. So we’re pleased to announce today the introduction of property pages on Homethinking.
Property pages aren’t listing pages but instead answer two simple questions: is the listing price high or low (as compared to Zillow’s estimate) and should you buy the house or would you be better off renting it (according to housemath.us calculations).
Here’s a sample:
And here’s a link to a page about a home in Phoenix, Arizona. We hope you enjoy and if you have any suggestions as to how we should make it better - let us know (feedback at homethinking dot com)!
People definitely want a view of high/low pricing, so bravo on question one. But who cares if it’s a better deal to rent? Consumers can’t act on that because the seller won’t accept such an offer. The only way that would be valuable is if you provided a link to a comparable rental listing. I would definitely use that!
Nicole Rufuku
15 May 07 at 12:52 pm
Many thanks for your comment Nicole. We’ll take that on board. With the buy vs rent we wanted to give people a sense for the mortgage amount but also that if they saw a place for rent that was below what the agnostic price was, they probably should take it.
But I like an integration with a rental site and we’ll think more about this.
Best.
Niki Scevak
Founder - Homethinking LLC
Administrator
15 May 07 at 2:36 pm
Your link for the home in AZ is broken. I’m not sure I’m seeing the benefit here. The first tool mentions seeing if a house is overpriced, but that’s exactly what Zillow does. If you’re just pulling the info from Zillow, why would someone use your tool instead of Z? And I’m with Nicole on the rent portion of your post. Maybe the link will be up later and I can have a better look.
shaun mclane
17 May 07 at 8:03 am
Apologies Shaun - the housemath API was down this morning and our code didn’t fail gracefully, shall we say. It should be fixed now.
As for the feature, the purpose is to add context to a real estate agents performance. In this case, what price did they choose to list at vs what Zillow thinks. We recognize Zillow isn’t the most reliable estimate but it’s a widely available starting point and over time we hope to see where their bias lays. But keep in mind it’s a contextual tangent rather than the main function of the site.
Either way, hopefully you have a chance to check out the page now and let me know what you think.
Niki Scevak
17 May 07 at 1:40 pm