November 11th, 2007

CyberHomes Emerges From Beta, With Claims of Better Real-Estate Data

Even as the housing market goes south, real-estate Websites continue to soldier on. On Tuesday, after a year in beta, CyberHomes will launch officially and join a crowded field that includes Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, and Realtor.com. “Even as the housing market has slid,” argues CyberHomes CEO Marty Frame, “the audience online is at an all-time high and growing. I think the basic story here is that you can only access people through their concerns – and there are a lot of concerns out there.” As the former chief technology officer of Realtor.com, Frame is only too aware of how attitudes towards real estate have shifted over the past few years. Like many other sites, CyberHomes allows homeowners and prospective purchasers to assess the value of particular properties, as well as general market conditions. For any property, you can see a list of comparable homes and how much they sold for. A new modular dashboard (based on Microsoft’s Silverlight) will personalize the homepage to each visitor’s preferences. There are also useful heat maps that show housing trends for a given city or region at a glance. Here is a heat map, for instance, of home prices in Silicon Valley (the redder the area, the more expensive the homes): And here is a heat map for the same area showing thepercentage change in prices this year (blue indicates a slight decline, and green is flat): But what exactly makes CyberHomes any different from the dozen other real-estate Websites out there? (After all, Trulia has heat maps). Frame says his data is better. Yes, we have heard this before. (Zillow Zestimate, anyone?). But CyberHomes may actually have an advantage here in that it is owned by Fidelity National Financial, one of the biggest title-insurance companies in the country. As such, Fidleity National Financial has a direct view on every home transaction in the country. “The key differentiators on the data is that we are the primary aggregator of it.,” says Frame. Other than the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) that brokers use, any company that wants information on properties sold, home ownership, or mortgage issuance needs to license it from one of two sources: either Fidelity National Financial or First American (which is where Zillow gets its data, through an intermediary company called Dataquick). Since CyberHomes has a direct line into the Fidelity National Financial database, Frame argues that the data on his site → Read More

Real-Time
Crunchbase

Energy Points — Received $3M in Series A funding from Plan B Ventures
2.13.2012
Wittlebee — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Plan B Ventures — Invested in Energy Points.
2.13.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Cidade Internet — Acquired by Populis.
2.1.2012
2.1.2012
2.9.2012
LetsBuy.com — Acquired by Flipkart.
2.9.2012
Cocoafish — Acquired by Appcelerator.
2.9.2012
Energy Points — Received $3M in Series A funding from Plan B Ventures
2.13.2012
StopTheHacker — Received $1.1M in Series A funding from Runa Capital
2.13.2012
Marin Software — Received $30M in Unattributed funding
2.13.2012
FNZ — Received Unattributed funding from General Atlantic
2.13.2012
LipoFIT Analytic — Received $9.5M in Series B funding from KfW Bankengruppe and Bayern Kapital
2.13.2012
Plan B Ventures — Invested in Energy Points.
2.13.2012
Runa Capital — Invested in StopTheHacker.
2.13.2012
General Atlantic — Invested in FNZ.
2.13.2012
2.13.2012
Bayern Kapital — Invested in LipoFIT Analytic.
2.13.2012
Jive Software — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:JIVE.
2.3.2012
Wittlebee — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Energy Points — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Aero Financial — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
StopTheHacker — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Rusnano — Company added to CrunchBase
2.13.2012
Fit Freeway — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
2.12.2012
Metier HR - Cloud Based HR Process Automation Suite — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
TweepsMap — Product added to CrunchBase
2.12.2012
Wupbox account — Product added to CrunchBase
2.11.2012
CrunchBase