Taking inspiration from the success of Zillow and Trulia’s ‘cool’ web site widgets, PriceFinder has recently released its own range of agent website tools for Australia. Widgets are an easy way to enhance your own website, increasing traffic and generating leads.

According to Kent Lardner, Chief Operating Officer of PriceFinder;
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Real Estate agents in Western Australia now have an amazing new tool to help them price properties for sale.

In a state wide first, the Real Estate Institute of WA has acquired the rights to use Pricefinder software, which agents and sales consultants can access from REIWA.

REIWA President Alan Bourke said Pricefinder will offer all the current features of PDOL, plus a number of exciting new features not seen before in WA.

“This software has been developed by Property Data Solutions to meet the specific requirements of members and will replace PDOL in November,” Mr Bourke said.
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By Kent Lardner for Lending Central

The Wall Street Journal did an analysis of the Zillow valuation model for 1,000 home sales in early 2007. It found that “the median difference between the Zillow estimate and the actual price was 7.8 percent.”

According to The Wall Street Journal test results, when it was wrong it was very wrong, off by 25 percent for one in 10 properties. This is certainly the case here in Australia too. You could be testing a model and find the first 9 properties return amazing results, all within a few percent of the sale price, then the next one could be 20% or more off target. It’s these few large errors that have such a significant impact on the forecast standard deviation (error estimate).
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Measuring house price movement is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you are removed from a local market. No two properties are ever the same, with size, position and quality varying significantly. Making things even more complicated is the fact that even similar properties can sell for very different prices, especially considering seller and buyer circumstances in these challenging economic times.

One common model used by many firms internationally including PriceFinder is what is known as a ‘repeat-sale’ model. This does have the distinct advantage of being simple to implement and requiring only an address and the sales history of the property to calculate price growth over time. Some drawbacks include the assumption that the house has not been renovated over time and the fact that only houses that have sold twice are used in the calculation, leaving many properties out of the sample.
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Property prices in the tourist towns of Cairns, Broadbeach, Mooloolaba and Hervey Bay have been placed on red alert as tourism job losses escalate, according to new research by Price Finder.

Home unit prices, which account for the majority of sales, have already dropped by 30 per cent in Cairns city and 13 per cent in Broadbeach in the past 12 months.

Price Finder researcher Kent Lardner said there was an oversupply of home unit stock in all of these areas. In Cairns the oversupply meant there was currently 45 months worth of home units on the market.
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Do over priced real estate listings usually lead to unsold properties?

PriceFinder Research Director, Kent Lardner, conducted an analysis of properties yet to be sold and still listed on the market after 50 days. New estimated prices where then used to calculate how much each listing was over or under priced.

“Our results confirmed that in nearly 50% of cases, the unsold properties had been listed at prices 10% or more above our PriceFinder estimate”, Kent said.
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