Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data
I guess I’ll join the pile on. Terabitz launched this morning, and was greated largely by a big yawn in the RE blogosphere.
The site looks great. Works easy enough as well. So, why the disinterest then?
Part of it might be a general malaise I sense sweeping online real estate. The big ideas that launched a year ago now seem a little stale. The appetite for all things real estate all the time, may be waning as consumers move on to the next big trend and the easy money is no longer to be found.
And unfortunately, while providing a pretty face and some fancy AJAX implementation, Terabitz is really recycling old ideas (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) into a new shell.
The big story here really seems to be that the company was given $10 million in VC funding and was originally conceived by a 15 year old kid, who is now the CTO of the company. He rounds out a team based of former execs from HouseValues and Move.com and surprisingly, Travis Chow, formerly of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research).
This company isn’t shy about dishing out the hyperbole either. Gotta love a press release that starts like this:
Every now and then consumers are introduced to a product that fundamentally changes the rules, rendering all prior offerings insufficient or even obsolete. Consider what iTunes has done for music, TiVo for television, or eBay for auctions, to name a few.
What Terabitz does give you is a real estate “dashboard” which you can customize with various data sources, including local amenities and market data. Start with an address and then pick and choose and drag and drop up to nine modules on your page.
1000Watt blog calls it the “Netvibes for real estate” and you could probably accomplish many of the same results had you just used that site. Yahoo Pipes would let you do the same thing too.
My biggest gripe with the site is I had no idea from where it was pulling its data. Other than the obviously branded icons (Zillow, Craigslist, Google) - I’m not sure where the data is coming from and how accurate it is.
Case in point, the comps it pulled on my house ranged from $75K to $1.49 Million. I’m no real estate agent, but that doesn’t seem right to me.
Terabitz is not a bad effort out the gates. Just weakly defined and it doesn’t really solve any pressing need for me. If they can better refine the concept on pulling a few key data sources together rather than everything including the coffee cup, then they may be onto something.
More on Terabitz from BloodhoundBlog and VentureBeat.
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8 Comment(s)
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- From Real Estate | Dec 31, 1969
- From Tecnología Inmobiliaria: Terabitz: Un netvibes del sector inmobiliario diseñado por un chaval de 15 años | Jul 20, 2007
- From Don’t Get It, Do You? at ChitownLiving | A Chicago Real Estate Blog | Jul 23, 2007
- From Terabitz: Un netvibes del sector inmobiliario diseñado por un chaval de 15 años | Aug 22, 2007
- From Completely didn’t see Terabitz going the… « 4realz.net | Jan 13, 2008
Matt | Jul 17, 2007 | Reply
That press release is absolutely hilarious, I read it three times and couldn’t stop chuckling.
The site has a very long way to go in terms of usability. I don’t see anything too new here at all. A couple interesting concepts, but implementation leaves a lot of room for improvement. Low barriers to entry and easily replicable (in a better fashion).
Incredible Agent | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
Joel, I am in the same boat everyone else is. I took a look and really didn’t get it. All we’re really talking about is more data & a little ajax dashboard. From my experience, that would only cost ~$100,000k with development, not $10 mil. (I know where they acquired most of their data.)
Anyways, the verdict is still out to see what else they do with their capital. So far it’s definitely not the ipod of real estate, but a good effort none the less.
Danilo Bogdanovic | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
I like their “drag and drop” feature though they are definitely lacking a few things. For one, their info on properties for sale is incomplete. And their data on market stats and sales data is incorrect. (Check my post for actual examples of these two things)
Just like you, I am very curious as to where they are getting their info from. Whomever it is, they need to get a better source.
And perhaps what’s lacking in the online real estate world is a site that atually provides seller, buyers and agents a value proposition and creates a community versus just a static platform for property listings. Purely listing sites are boring and someone needs to come up with something a but more exciting and engaging.
TitleRep | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
I played with the site for a while and found in the end, I really hadn’t gotten much more than just a bunch of data scraped from other sites that I was able to move around.
I ended up finally clicking on one of the listings, which took me to Trulia, where I stayed for a good half an hour. So much for building a site that keeps users occupied. Trulia can thank them…
Let’s hope they can pull it together and make something useful out of it.
Alex Mather | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
Cool idea but, like any brand new site, it needs some work. My suggestions:
1. 9 modules? Do we really need that many? I feel that 4 much larger modules would be less confusing.
2. I feel like you should be able to create bigger modules. All modules need not be the same size. For example, the listings module should be bigger.
3. Publish an API and let other companies add their modules to the site. The current options leave a lot to be desired.
4. Why aren’t items in a module clickable? Am I doing something wrong?
Hawaii Life | Jul 18, 2007 | Reply
The site is very clunky and confusing. This is a miss for me. I’ve been waiting for over a minute now for the MLS listings to load on a map. That’s way too long.
With that said, there are some nice features, like the integration of craigslist and google base.
Trang - The Legacy Group | Jul 19, 2007 | Reply
It’s a good idea, but it is far too similar to igoogle and the new google mapplets and yahoo widgets and netvibes, and I’m sure if I looked hard enough I would find some comparisons to eharmony too…
10 million VC, wow!!!
mr search engine | Sep 26, 2007 | Reply
wow,
seems that the general opinion is that we are all looking for a website that pulls useful data from every single real estate site on the internet, and displays it in a nice neat manner.
hmmmm. i have just the thing.
set to be launched October 15, 2007
BeatYouThere.com
ahhh, your prayers are answered