Q&A With Myron Lo at ZipRealty

I had the chance to send Myron Lo, ZipRealty’s Director of Product Strategy, a few questions to learn more about the thought process behind their latest release adding Realius community estimating technology to their listing detail pages. Below are my questions and his responses:

Q: What lessons did you learn from your initial integration on a sub domain?

A: After our initial launch on the sub-domain site, we learned that the prediction game was becoming a great tool for our customers to educate themselves on the real estate market. Often times, in the process of predicting home prices, customers would actually find a home they were interested in buying.

Another big discovery for us was that the ZIP community price predictions were becoming great predictors of what homes would actually sell for (in many instances). This revelation supported our initial hypothesis where we believed we would be able to harness the ‘wisdom of crowds’ from our community.

Q: What kind of feedback did you get from consumers?

A: The overall feedback from our customers was great. In addition to making real estate a little more fun, our customers appreciated the extra price opinion they would get with the ‘ZIP Community Price’. The biggest suggestion they had for us was to integrate our community pricing more tightly with our main website so that they’d be able to see price predictions for the specific homes they were interested in.

Q: Talk a little bit about the development effort required to integrate this technology. Is this something most brokerages with their own development team could integrate somewhat easily?

A: In my opinion, if a brokerage has its own development team, this type of integration should be fairly straightforward. While the integration effort won’t be as simple as a Google Maps integration, it certainly is much easier than building this type of application from scratch.

Q: What’s the next innovative feature ZipRealty is working on?

A: In general, we’re always trying to find innovative solutions to make the consumer real estate process easier and more efficient. We haven’t finalized any of our upcoming plans, but we’ll certainly keep you in the loop when we do.