Surefield launched their Pricepoint this week (see GeekWire coverage), which you can test out here (coverage for properties in Western Washington only).

The concept of personalizing an automated valuation model with custom comps is not new, of course. During my time at Zillow, I spoke with consumers all the time who used our My Estimate feature to publish their own estimates by revising the comps. It was useful to select your own comps, sure, and publish them– but most home owners really have no idea what accurate comps are and using the feature often brought more confusion as to how AVM’s work. I just played around with Zillow’s claiming, and “update my Zestimate” functionality (My Estimate functionality was removed in 2011) for a few minutes. While the functionality of refining comps is still available (see screenshot here & here), it’s certainly not as clean as Surefield’s Pricepoint.

My concern with Pricepoint is consumers don’t have the faintest idea what constitutes a real comparable. Are estimates produced more or less accurate than the starting point? Well, it depends on which comps are selected (and a wide, wide range of other factors). I certainly get the agent/broker scenario more so than the consumer one. This will be a great recruiting tool, as it’ll bring other agents to their website because chances are Pricepoint is better than the tool they are currently using to do this work.

Consumers, or agents, can’t save estimates right now. Imagine if all those CMA’s were stored, and accessible publicly. What if you searched an address, and you saw “Agent produced CMA’s for 123 Main St”, and ability to dive into the details — prices along with date created, and more information about the agent (and a way to contact them)? Yes, I think that is a damn compelling proposition.

Will this kill Zestimates? No. But is it a compelling product? Absolutely.