Google Gadgets

Saneprice.com believes in open access to data. We have created igoogle gadgets to access the trend graphs. You can add these gadgets to your igoogle or to your google.com or your orkut page by clicking on .

The gadget lets you choose a city to watch trends and also a refresh frequency. For instance, our igoogle page looks like this:

We will be adding more gadgets and visualizations as days go by.

Graphs

We have added summary graphs for the home page. The graphs track the median price per locality. Even within a given locality, price swings are extreme. Median price value seems to be the more sensible way to present this data. However, since these are median prices, they will not reflect the prices of the highest end apartments or the lowest end apartments. These graphs are suitable to watch trends in the market.

Also as we gather more data and the graphs become coarse grained, the volatile swings in prices would go down. These graphs are plotted on a daily basis now, hence the crazy price swings. Once we move past this and go towards weekly reporting, the results would be much more smoother.

For absolute values of properties, one should use the search functionality. Search results can now be viewed as graphs as well.

Try it out!

Shoutout from India Housing Bubble

Vik posted a small blurb about saneprice in his excellent blog.

Thanks Vik.

Added rentals

After talking to Vik of India Housing Bubble, I have added support for adding rental information in the site. Users can now enter rental pricing as well.

Saneprice.com is back up

After a hiatus, http://www.saneprice.com is back up.

I have been trying to figure out what the real price of real estate in India is and I get really frustrated by the lack of transparency in the system.

Recently, I tried to find out what the going price for the land I bought in Bangalore in 2004.

The layout has an email list. I ended up emailing about 2 dozen people who sold / tried to sell land in the past 6 months and guess what, prices were 40% apart and there are NO buyers right now.

Buyers have a right for this information and my hope is they would be willing to provide it as well.

In the US, one can quickly find out the current, past prices of any location and make your judgments accordingly. In India, it is impossible to do that.

As a geek and I wrote a website to try to achieve this. I want to crowd-source this information and see if we can generate trends from the data.

For now, I seed the data from various realty sites, based on the sellers listed price.

Ideally I need this information from users [they can be anonymous and don't have to give specific details]. In an ideal world, there must be a Government entity that has all the records of real estate transactions, but given how black money works in the Indian Real Estate system, that data would be useless.