Today, we at Homethinking are proud to announce the launch of neighborhoods.homethinking.com. Here’s the full press release. I’d also like to take a second and introduce myself. My name is Alex Mather and I am joining Niki Scevak and his Homethinking.com team as the new Product Manager.

What Makes it Different (and Useful)

While other sites give statistics on each neighborhood (Redfin, Trulia, and Zillow are great at this.) This data is useful (especially concerning schools and market trends), but from afar it’s still tough to really understand the neighborhood.

Imagine if we just designed a new fruit, we can spout out all of the data on it: 53% sour, 20% sweet, pH level of 2.2, citric acid levels, size in centimeters, it’s color, etc. You’d know a lot about the fruit but you wouldn’t know what it would taste like, would you? Now, imagine if we said our new fruit is like a lemon but bigger and sweeter, you’d know a lot more. Heck, your mouth might even water. (Example inspired by Made to Stick.)

Learning a new city by comparing its neighborhoods to the neighborhoods of a city you know well will allow you to get a feel for a new city quickly and easily.

How We Compared Neighborhoods

From our website:

Neighborhoods scores are initially calculated using demographic data from the US Census and other public sources. Wide numbers of demographic factors, such as age, marital status, whether the household has kids or not and the frequency of arts and culture activities, among other variables, were compared. The scores are then refined over time by reviews from people just like you.

Obviously, data only tells part of the story. We think of data as a starting point and that user reviews will eventually be the primary way we compare neighborhoods.

Calling All Agents!

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 38% of movers (over 16 million) moved to a different county including 19% that moved to another state!

Are you a real estate agent with an intimate knowledge of more than one city? This is your chance to show off your expertise – for free! Here are all of the ways you can get exposure:

1. Free exposure when you compare neighborhoods.
2. Top reviewers in each city get free exposure on city pages.
3. Premier exposure for all pages in a specific cities by paying to be featured for specific zip codes.

We all know the CAR statistic that 69% of people hire the first agent the communicate with. If you’re interested in being noticed by some of the 16 million people moving counties each year, this is your chance!

There’s More to Come

We’re just getting started in our efforts to make relocating easy so stay tuned for more features. We look forward to your feedback.

At Homethinking, we’re dedicated to helping people find the right Realtor to sell their home with. We think that a good Realtor can provide definite benefits for anyone thinking about selling their most valuable asset. But while we’re of the opinion that real estate professionals are well worth their commissions, not everyone agrees with us. FSBOs (For Sale By Owner) are certainly a valid slice of the market, and so I decided to find out just how many there were. Of course, this wasn’t as easy as it might sound, so I had to settle for stats on currently available FSBOs from one of the largest FSBO sites on the web, ForSaleByOwner.com, coupled with projected census data for 2005.

According to the data I collected on 9/13/06, there are 38,721 properties listed in the United States on ForSaleByOwner.com. The states with highest concentration of FSBOs (in terms of people per FSBO) were:

And the States with the lowest rate of FSBOs in the country were:

There are some caveats with the data. The number of FSBO listings traditionally is 15-20% of the market. According to realtor.com there are 3 million listings with a Realtor representing them. So forsalebyowner.com’s 40,000 are clearly not representative of the whole market. And their sales team might be better in some areas than others causing a skew towards those states where they are better or worse.

But still the question of why a home owner in Michigan is over ten times more likely than his compatriot in Hawaii to go the FSBO route is an intriguing one. Perhaps even more intriguing, California – with Silicon Valley at its heart – features so low on the list. So the technology savvy of its inhabitants, it seems, does not necessarily effect the decision to engage a Realtor when selling their home.

If you’re state isn’t on the list, just leave a comment and we’ll be sure to post it.

-Tony Floriani

Our new site went live this morning bringing maps closer to the forefront of navigation and showing the great progress we’ve made recently in expanding our coverage (we have over 1.5 million transactions now).

One thing that we’ve been wanting to do for a while is make our mapping features more interactive and useful to consumers. Now mapping takes center stage as a way for people to find and compare homes sold in a particular area. On the new site, you’ll be able to get all of the pertinent information about a home that’s been sold or is for sale (i.e. who sold it, when, and for how much) from helpful markers right on the map! Then, if you want to learn more about the sale or the agent involved, you can simply click on the link for additional details.

But just as important as the site’s new look is what’s under the hood. We’ve been working nonstop to increase our coverage of home sales transactions for 2006, and those efforts are really paying off. With all of the new data we’ve collected (and will continue to collect) we can offer even better service in the locations we cover, while rapidly incorporating new locations which were previously unavailable to us.

If you want to view the full press release, you can do so here, and below is an example of a map you can place on your blog through an emerging standard called GeoRSS – which is an extension of the commonly used RSS. You can find out more about the map you see below by going to this page on our site.

-Tony Floriani

»Get a recent home sales map for your site.
» About: Homethinking monitors what each real estate agent has done and consumer reviews about them.

Know someone’s friend’s son who is in real estate? Chances are you probably do. During the steep appreciation of home prices in the past decade, more than a few people have decided to join the real estate industry. In fact, in Miami there is currently around one realtor for every seventeen people.

To investigate just how crowded the market has become, we took CNN’s rank of the 25 most pricey cities to live in and ran that against our data on roughly 1.5m real estate agents to see what cities had the highest ratio of real estate agents per person (as defined by someone who bases themselves in that city or has managed a recent listing/sale there). Here’s what we came up with:

Over time the number of agents has tended to follow home prices. So if home prices continue to appreciate, perhaps the marketing industry nirvanna of one to one marketing really will, quite literally, be realized in certain cities over the decades – if not in the form of what the inventors had originally envisioned!