Condo Geeks | The Tool to Analyze and Forecast the Miami Condo Market

In this new episode of our ‘Better Decisions’ podcast David Siddons interviews Salil, Owner of SmartGeeks and Co-Founder of Condo Geeks. The podcast discusses the importance of data driven decisions and how Condo Geeks is an absolute must when buying or selling a Miami condo.

The Chapters: 00:00 Introduction, 00:40 About Salil Gupta, Co-founder of Condo Geeks, 02:50 Learning from the mistakes of a bad investment, 06:45 The Creation of Condo Geeks, 09:10 The challenges of finding accurate data, 12:20 The Condo Geeks Software Explained, 14:30 The Closed Data Screen Explained, 18:30 Using Condo Geeks to make a better investment decisions, 23:22 Tracking today’s market 34:20 Purchasing a pre-construction condo, 40:15 Recognizing “great deals”

What is Condo Geeks?

Condo Geeks is a brand new and sophisticated tool, which is essentially a Bloomberg terminal for real estate. The tool empowers you to analyze entire neighborhoods, individual condos or a selection of condos. It provides users with the ability to look at the performance of a neighborhood / condo over time (amount of sales, prices per SF, discounts given and days on market) or to compare neighborhoods / condos to one another. It is essentially the best tool for consumers to see what a market is doing. 

Why Was Condo Geeks Created?

Condo Geeks was created in order to provide buyers and sellers of Miami real estate with clear and insightful data within seconds. The tool allows consumers to make better decisions. Why would the real estate market with its multi-million dollar investments not offer the same data and information as the stock market?

When Condo Geeks founder Salil purchased his first Miami condo he realized he had made the decision to purchase based on a glossy brochure rather than focusing on data. This is a very relatable story to many people who come to Miami and buy a (new construction) condo based on an attractive brochure and sales pitch. They are not aware of how a neighborhood has historically performed and what data to focus on. When Salil bought his second condo, he wanted to focus on data. He downloaded all the closed condo sales in the past seven to eight years to track how the market behaved at a building and neighborhood level. This was an extremely time-consuming task but provided the historical data necessary to make a data-driven decision that has turned out to be a good investment.

During this time David Siddons was one of the only agents giving analytical data on the market and specific sub-markets. Every six months David would release a market report where he would run data and put tables and charts together. Thinking there must be a better way to collect historical data other than putting it into a spreadsheet and spending hours analyzing it, David met Salil. They both quickly realized they share the same objective: to provide buyers and sellers with immediate data. At the time, and still today, there was no live system that allowed you to read the markets on a granular level.

The Condo Geeks Software Explained

The closed data is an important place to start, because it gives you the dollar per square foot amount and a basic understanding of the economic cycle. The software allows you to analyze individual condos and neighborhoods on a dollar per square foot basis. You can track the performance of a building from its inception to the current date. Every neighborhood in Miami is covered, from Brickell to Coral Gables to Miami Beach and within these neighborhoods, you can track and analyze the performance of all the key buildings. Buyers today don’t necessarily discriminate against one specific neighborhood or building. They might want a beachfront experience and are open to South of Fifth, Bal Harbour, or Key Biscayne, whichever area provides the most value. In the below video and in this blog we explain more about how to use the tool and how consumers will benefit from using it.

Purchasing a Condo Pre-Construction

There are some important factors to consider when purchasing a condo pre-construction. The sales office is not going to provide additional information other than what’s given by the developer and architect.  This is because they don’t have access to the data and are primarily focused on the product they are selling. The data that you do receive when buying pre-construction is swayed because the developers will not disclose what previous units have sold for and this data is protected until closing and is recorded on the tax roll.

Condo Geeks allows you to focus on the tangibles of what’s most important and that’s the floor plan, the functionality of the building, and how the building compares in real-time to other comparable buildings. If you are planning to purchase a pre-construction condo and wait years to move in, there should be an upside. For example, if you are paying $2,300 a foot and other buildings are selling for around $2,300 a foot, you are not going to be any better off than you would be if you bought a re-sale product. Condo Geeks allows you the opportunity to decide if the timing is right to buy or whether you should wait. As you see inventory grow in certain sectors and pending sales decrease you can start to realize your room for negotiation.

Finding the “Great Deals”

We are currently working on a ‘great deals’ section, which shows you the units that are listed below market value. The algorithm is currently being developed and the data will be refreshed on a daily basis. This means that you can go into the system and you can see which units are priced below market value. Lets say a certain type of unit within a condo has traded at $1,000 per SF and a new listing in that condo comes in at $800, the system will highlight it.
Likewise you can see the best deals ever made in that condo. You can analyze the lowest three sales in that condo and they will provide you with pictures and everything so you can really compare it. This way you can see what kind of deal you are getting compared to other sales in the building.

COMING SOON: Home Geeks

We are super excited about this new project. The Condo Geeks tool has been so useful for us and soon we will have the Home Geeks software, which will allow us and you to analyze the home market in a matter of minutes. Subscribe to our network so we can keep you updated on when this new tool is ready.