Everyone in EDA is really smart. People who leave EDA and go and work in other industries, especially people who left in the late 1990s for internet startups, notice that this is not true elsewhere. Not that there aren’t smart people in internet startups, just that not everyone is. EDA is an industry where you need a master’s degree to be in sales, never mind the kind of deep domain knowledge that is necessary to be in engineering inside an EDA company. I know there are smart people at, say, Oracle too. But let’s face it, relational database technology doesn’t require a major re-write every couple of years to address a new process node. Sure, databases get bigger, there are more cores, and so on. Double patterning, FinFETs and sea changes like that, not so much.
So it is always interesting when people leave the EDA industry to address some other industry but with the “EDA attitude” to doing it in a smart way. Realibrium.com is one such company that takes some of the basic analytic approach that is commonplace in EDA and applies it to buying and selling condominiums and homes. Elias Echeverri started the company (and wrote the code) and it is now going live. Disclosure: Elias is a friend, worked with me at VLSI, Ambit, Cadence and Envis.
Currently Realibrium.com only covers cities in Miami area as a test market, and will be expanding to
New York city in the next couple of months. Despite not being in it, Miami is the capital of South America due to its location (and somewhat of Europe, at least for international investors). South America is much further east than you think. Trivia question: if you go south from Atlanta GA, which is the first South American country you hit? Brazil? Belize? Venezuela? Answer: none, Atlanta is to the west of the whole South American continent. The whole of the south part of Miami Beach is taken up by modern towers of condos. There is a very international market of buyers and sellers, plus people from all over the US. So it is a good test market. Plus, as everywhere else, most realtors are clueless about technology, no matter how well they know the local market conditions.
The site has an automatic data feed for all condos and homes on the market and all sales. It can tell you all the properties that are currently for sales and lots of average data about that. But it can do much deeper trend analysis, such as looking at the trend in selling price per square foot and the ROI based on rental prices. Clearly prices are going up.
Or the average number of days on the market. Just by looking at this graph you can see how much the market has tightened and how it has become a sellers’ market. If you want to buy a condo now…well, you should have done it a year ago!
By using the trend data, there are algorithms that can give good estimate of what any given condo should cost, what you should put it on the market at (it also handles rental properties both for people buying to rent, people renting a property they own, and people looking for a property to rent).
Check it out. The menu at the top of the screen allows you to search for a property to buy (err…probably pretend to buy). The graphs above come from the market analysis which builds reports on the fly for wherever you want. It is all pretty self-explanatory (especially if you have the experience of buying or selling a property somewhere, probably not Miami).
The Realibrium.com website is here. There is also a blog.
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