Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten

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?

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Want to ask me a personal question? Contact me at boris@bomega.com

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We are extremely busy with The Next Web Conference 2008 but that doesn’t mean we don’t work on our other projects too. If you feel lucky you might want to play around with our new and improved Fleck.com service. Officially in beta at http://beta3.fleck.com/

Screenshot:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

I started working on two new projects today.

1: Captchatising.com
As you might have noticed on The Next Web Blog we use the names of our advertisers instead of random characters. Easier for people to understand, great for our advertisers and just as hard for spammers. Today Diederik persuaded me to actually start a new project to develop this for other blogs too. We will build the platform and try to attract advertisers to advertise on blogs hosting our CAPTCHAs. Now we only have to find someone to build it and someone to manage it. Interested?

2: 100 SEO Tips
This project is a lot less ambitious. With every WordPress install comes a plug-in titled ‘Hello Dolly’. It displays random sentences from the famous song with the same title. I took a look at it today and figured I could do something more useful with that technology. So I started a public spreadsheet at Google Docs titled “100 SEO tips” and asked people (via Twitter) to contribute Search Engine Optimization tips there. As soon as I have 100 tips collected I will publish this Plug-in to Wordpress.org. If you want to contribute (I will link to you as a contributor) contact me and I will invite you to the document as an editor.

This has been a busy week. Last night I visited the Hyves party and a few people mentioned that I didn’t blog much this week. Vincent Everts told me he assumed I was on a holiday because of the silence. Well, no holiday for me! Just busy with a few of our new projects. One of them is the The Next Web Blog. As you know we organize The Next Web Conference and we also kept up a blog for each conference.

These conference blogs are very popular the few weeks before the conference but are hard to maintain after the conference ends. We all get back to our other jobs and we know that keeping up a blog is a full time job.

But we also think we have a lot to talk about regarding the future of the web and the people building it. So we decided to take a chance and hire a full time editor for TheNextWeb.org. Our plan is to blog, a lot, about events and people that influence the direction of the future of the Web.

We won’t officially launch until January and use the following weeks to get up to speed and add features and content. I hope you can check the blog out, subscribe to the RSS feed and give us some feedback on the posts:

http://thenextweb.org

We are all addicted to this little game at the office. I only wish they would have given me this while in school, before I dropped out.

Play at your own risk:

UPDATE: forgot to mention (thanks Patrick) that we discovered this game by using the new version of Fleck. The new version allows you to share everything you find and annotate with groups. Works very well!

If you own an iPhone you can now read this blog optimized for it. I installed the iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme by ContentRobot which automatically shows you an optimized theme if you are visiting this blog on an iPhone.

Installing it was very easy and my blog looks very nice on the iPhone now. They should offer this software to every site owner…