Baron Briefs

Trading of housing “binaries” returned to HedgeStreet today with three additional cities: Las Vegas, Denver and Washington, DC. That brings the total number of cities available for hedging and speculation to ten.

HedgeStreet’s website describes their hedging instruments as a way consumers can “speculate the degree to which their home will appreciate, or conversely, hedge against depreciation in the value of their home”. But I’d be willing to bet (no pun intended) they’d increase trading volume rapidly if they pitched to real estate agents as a way to hedge asking prices. For example, Joe Realtor could suggest a slightly higher asking price for a listing and place a bet against rising prices using HedgeStreet.

In any event, I think HedgeStreet is a cool idea and hope it gains more traction this year whomever the traders may be.

My-Currency.com launched this week to much fanfare. The idea is to generate home values using crowd intelligence. Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, yea. RealtyBaron launched its version of crowdsourcing back in 2004 (before the word ‘crowdsourcing’ was even coined). From our press release:

Estimates generated by IntelligentValue(TM) are composed of price opinions from homeowners and real estate agents in the area in which the property is located. Properties are shown randomly and include an exterior photo, feature descriptions, and an interactive map for easily identifying location. Opinions are applied to estimates daily providing real-time feedback to property owners.

The feature, called IntelligentValueâ„¢, was removed from the website last year for retooling. It will relaunch next month so don’t label us as copycats when you see it again.

Business 2.0 put real estate on the cover of their November edition which arrived in the mail this week. As with any real estate feature, I dove in immediately. The coverage is good because it doesn’t dwell on the bubble bursting. Rather, opportunity is the focus.

Within seconds, however, my eyes were drawn to a footer on page 85 titled “New Ways to Buy and Sell: The latest real estate websites go beyond just searching the listings”. Occupying one of only eight panels was none other than RealtyBaron.com:

It’s an awesome feeling to see a major business publication take notice of my creation. Thanks, Business 2.0.