DotHomes.com launches Property Price Tracker to measure property performance
Press release
London, 26 November 2007: DotHomes.com (‘DotHomes’), the property search engine, has today announced the launch of its Property Price Tracker. This freely available performance assessment tool enables property owners, prospective buyers, investors, developers, vendors, estate agents and other property market participants to assess / compare the values of property assets and the performance of these over time.
The new Property Price Tracker service introduced by DotHomes provides property owners with an accurate guide to how their property investments have performed over time against a wide range of variable market data, including average national property prices, average London property prices, FTSE100 indices and Bank of England base rates. In addition, it allows prospective buyers to assess and compare property prices and returns on investment in different geographical locations.
The Property Price Tracker works by estimating property price fluctuations based on the asking prices of comparable properties, together with hedonically* adjusted historical data from several sources, principally mortgage lending companies. These historical data sources record the sold prices of properties over time, and adjust the prices according to variations in property characteristics such as number of bedrooms, number of floors, property type, the existence of a garden or off-street parking. This is significantly more instructive than the sold-price data provided by the Land Registry, which does not take into account property characteristics.**
The tracked information, which is presented graphically on the DotHomes Website, includes both absolute figures and return-on-investment percentages presented in the style of the equity and currency plots used on financial trading floors.
DotHomes.com, which was formerly known as Extate, is a property search engine which uses an innovative ‘Google-type’ approach to property search. The engine uses ‘robots’ to search widely for estate agency listings and then extracts and sorts (or ’parses’) key information and produces easy-to-read summaries that link directly through to estate agents’ original listings. DotHomes provides property hunters with an easier and more transparent online property search mechanism, which is entirely free, and estate agents with a free and effortless marketing platform.
Douglas de Jager, co-founder of BytePlay, DotHomes’ parent company, said of the Property Price Tracker: “This new, innovative service brings a richness and quality of information to anyone involved in the property market, providing users of DotHomes with an accurate guide to the performance of either individual properties or property portfolios. It can also provide home buyers with a guide to property performance in areas they are considering purchasing a property and we believe it will prove to be an invaluable tool in helping anyone involved in the buying and selling property to make crucial property investment decisions.”
* Hedonic regression is a statistical method for estimating demand or prices. It decomposes the item being researched into its constituent characteristics, and obtains estimates of the value of each characteristic.
** Land Registry data, which runs from 2000, does not include room number, floor size, lease period, or any other such characteristics.
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For further information, please contact:
Douglas de Jager, dothomes.com, +44 (0)7790 663157, d [at] byteplay.com
Media enquiries:
Annabel O’Connor / Peter Curtain, Capital MS&L, +44 (0)20 7307 5330
annabel.oconnor [at] capitalmsl.com / peter.curtain [at] capitalmsl.com
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Notes to editors:
BytePlay
BytePlay is a London-based search technology company. It was founded in May 2006 by Artemi Krymski and Douglas de Jager, two young alumni of Europe’s leading technology university, Imperial College London. BytePlay focuses on the development of parsing technologies which characterise typed or vertical search. Dothomes.com is the company’s first consumer-facing product.
In June 2007 Artemi was nominated by Business Week as Europe’s Young Entrepreneur 2007. In July 2007 the search engine was picked out by The Guardian newspaper as one of its Top 10 dotcoms to watch. In November 2007 Esquire magazine shortlisted Dothomes as ‘Best New Idea’ at its Man at the Top Awards 200, along with Waitrose, Fashion Academy and Yotel
The Accelerator Group
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Arts Alliance
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