OpenIdea: Taxati.com
Someone once told me that there are two happy moment in the life of a boat owner: the day he buys his boat and the day he sells it. The rest is spent fixing, moving, cleaning and worrying about the boat.
I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners. All these websites try to make money when people want to buy or sell their house. That means that most people rarely need them.
My upstairs neighbors just sold their house. The price they got per square meter (€4191) means that my house almost doubled in value since we bought it 7 years ago. I hadn’t thought about that until my neighbors sold their house and I recalculated the value.
So that got me thinking. Could it be possible to build a service that appeals to home owners and keeps them up-to-date on the value of their house, what similar houses in the neighborhood get sold for, what their over-allowance is and if they can’t get a better mortgage based on the value of their house and the current interest rates.
There are a few variables that make it hard to predict the value of real-estate. But I’m just suggesting that we really predict values only based on square meters. What i would propose is that we take the last known valuation (you bought the house for how much?) and take that as a the basis. Then we look at what other houses in your area get sold for and based on that we could multiply the value of your house.
My guess (but I’m not that good with math so that is why this is an OpenIdea) is that the more houses are added to the database the more precise it will be able to predict the value of a house.
There will always be exceptions and factors that will influence the price of your house positively or negatively but those could be added as we find out about them. Lets say you buy a few extra square meters of garden or you find out that your roof is leaking. In the database you could say ‘Shape of building: needs work” which we could translate into “needs work = 5% off value”. A bigger garden would be “Square meters x average garden value + total value”.
I can image that if you have the last 6 transactions of a house and the houses around it, the current interest rates and a few more variables you could give people a pretty good estimate of the value of their houses.
I registered the domain name Taxati.com for this OpenIdea. In The Netherlands a ‘taxatie’ means ‘Appraisal’.
Although the math behind the calculations will be pretty complicated in the long term the basic system should be easy to build. People should be able to input a few values and their contact data and then we could send them a weekly update on the value of their house, including a few interesting deals to re-insure, re-mortgage or maybe just sell their houses.
Who wants to help me build it?
Reminds me of the time when I was working on Funda.nl, they offer demographic information about the neighborhood (dutch only) http://www.funda.nl/Woningaanb.....t&OIB
It wouldn’t be to silly to connect to approach M. Joosten about this project. I can help here and there as well!
It’s a good idea but the execution (system) does need some work. What you actually want to do is provide a information service that one normally has to figure out by (or pay for) spending a few hours on various sources. You don’t have to wait for more houses to be added to the database for it is able to predict the value of a house. You can just feed it by:
“I noticed that most real-estate websites concentrate on these two moments (buy & sell) when it comes to home owners.”
Or to stretch it more; use crawlers to search and attach news/event/building plans etc on the street/neighbourhood to the object, a bit of social functionalities etc etc. The basic set of functionality you posted is in my opinion not enough.
The american site Zillow is doing kinda the same, with showing a avarage price per square meter besides the asked price: http://www.zillow.com/HomeDeta.....p=20513122 also reminds me a bit of how http://www.zomoto.nl gives people the possibility to get an estimate of the value of your car. Would be nice to see if Funda (or Jaap, or who-ever) puts an estimate value besides each house on sale
zillow.com does / tries this.
Sjors & Ben: I think you are talking about the MakeMeMove service that Zillow offers? That is the only thing I could find that resembles it but it is also a completely different service than I described here. Am I missing another feature on Zillow?
Actual price estimated:
http://www.zillow.com/howto/Zestimate.htm
That is not to say it’s not a good idea / fun to do it for .NL.
I like your idea. It is not so easy as it seems…
It is more then math that you need. You need historic and current data from all similar houses around. You can combine for example the info from Midas, Kadaster, Tiara, Marktpositie and dataland. Landmark is one off the company’s that combines all that data example: http://www.landmarkinfo.nl/
NBWO http://www.nbwo.nl/ provided a service for woonkran, so that for 12,50 you receive an document with the current value vb: http://woonkrant.nl/static/voo.....waarde.pdf
The services I mentioned above cost money, because the data company’s like kadaster ask money. You can offer your service for free, and make a living by being an affiliate for new mortgages or insurenses.
zillow makes a rough estimate for the house, but lets you add improvements for the house so you can see what the price will be if you make your house better. So it is an estimate … estimate. Cool site feature, not exact.
http://www.zillow.com/myestima.....p=20513122
My vision: Normal taxaties are history very soon.
It is possible to combine the data, add some extra detailed information about the house and a computer can do a taxatie. The banks in holland are happy with it, because now one person (a taxateur) decides what a house is worth, is that fare?
Very interesting. , If I wanted to sell my house (bloemgracht), I know I could probably sell it with almost a half of the the value profit. (in less then 2 years!)
But with a tool/website like taxati I could convince the potential buyers even more to buy it for the asked price. Exporting comparison reports in pdf would be a perfect feature.
Ich weiss nicht fasole bedeute, warum ich frohlich bin….mein madchen ist….
Pretty interesting idea Boris! I could definitely help you build this. [contact me by email]
It’s a nice idea, and any calculation no matter how complex can be made in a split second nowadays so that’s not the problem. The tough part is gathering enough data to calculate with. Therefore, I think you have to use the ‘Kadaster’ like a normal appraiser would do. And that information is not very expensive, but it’s not free.
And what are you aiming at? The real market value, or the intrinsic value. That can make a huge difference is also depending on the source of data you’re using.
Besides that the home-owners have to provide a lot of info. Most of them probably don’t know how many square or cubicle meters they have. And they will probably state that the condition of something is ‘excellent’ when in fact it’s ‘fair’, or ‘fair’ when it’s ‘poor’…
Maybe it’s best to give an estimated range instead of an exact figure. Then you can also offer the clients a discount for a real-life appraisal if they want to know the exact value.
But nevertheless, I like the idea! Something new in the highly competitive online real estate business war.
It does exist in the netherlands, zoekallehuizen.nl shows you the last prices for which houses in your neighbourhood were sold, see:
http://www.hyped.nl/details/20....._makelaar/
Sounds fantastic. I already am on a mailing list from various local property companies in the UK to try and stay up to date with the price of my property, plus I use houseprices.co.uk In the UK we wouldn’t really be interested in the square footage price, but the overall price for a studio, 1 bed, 2 bed etc or the average for a road.
So I guess for the UK if a service took data from services like the free houseprices site calculated the difference due to price of inflation, I might get an even better average house price than I badly guess.
Plus I would then enjoy receiving tips via updated emails from a such site on how to head towards the higher the estimated value.
Good luck with your idea.
Great idea!. You could implement Planon software, my brother in law works there. They work with software that calculates a maintenance forecast for buildings. So you can manage the costs for maintenance. This makes it more transparent.
Great idea indeed, but there is already someone doing it, http://www.stayorgo.nl.
Lately I needed a new “taxatie”. So a professional came by and the outcome was that stayorgo’s prediction was 5K less then the official taxatie report!
“Someone once told me that there are two happy moment in the live of a boat owner:” > Live = Life.
Another site which is quite interesting is http://www.cbsinuwbuurt.nl , where you can enter your city and neighborhood and i.e. select ‘Housing’ as a theme. You will be presented with the average ‘WOZ-waarde’ (value of your house as seen by the Dutch gov./tax dept) of your neighborhood and a couple of other statistics. It could be interesting to incorporate these statistics as well in your idea.
Wat is de waarde?
Het ene is het andere niet!
HA won