Real Estate News

Outside.in has you covered.

They have just launched a new product called Outside.in for Publishers – what they’re calling “an out-of-the-box hyperlocal news section for your website”.

Features include:

• Customized Neighborhood News Pages for every neighborhood in your market.
• Rich, interactive maps, headlines, and excerpts.
• Access to aggregated stories from all local blogs, news sites, and other sources—including Twitter!
• Tools to curate the stories, sources, and tags that will appear on your site.

The product is free but does come embedded ads from Outside.in. There is an ad-free version that can be licensed however.

I think this would be a great product to integrate with any online real estate research tool. A way to quickly mashup listings, neighborhoods with a real-time view of the events happening around you.

Combine this with the ratings from Walkscore, a proximity search filter like Estately’s, market data widgets from Altos Research and, of course, listings drawn hopefully from the MLS and you start to have a very compelling tool for consumers to dive in to.

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Source:
Looking for Hyperlocal Content?

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6 months ago I gave up my cable TV subscription. How? One word.

Boxee.

Boxee is a revolutionary application that lets you pull together all your media together in a single browser that you can access from the comfort of your couch. I truly believe that Boxee – when combined with a device like my AppleTV – is the future of television. It lets me consume all the media I’ve gathered on my local network as well as hook in to all kinds of web-based streaming content; including breaking news, music and, of course, video.

Recently, the company launched a contest for developers to get companies to write applications (”plugins”) that can be added to a Boxee installation.

The folks at WellcomeMat obliged and built a wicked cool app that let’s you browse and search for local videos on your TV.

They’re asking for your help too – vote for them and help them win the developer challenge. Today’s the last chance to cast your ballot.

So why is this all important? As we move into this brave new world of web marketing where everyone becomes a content producer, it’s important to consider where the new distribution channels may lie. Whether it’s new devices like the Kindle (see FOREM now on Kindle) or new platforms like Boxee – figuring out your syndication strategy is going to become as important — if not more so — than creating the words, or video, in the first place.

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Read the original post:
WellcomeMat Brings Local Video to Your TV

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A nice demonstration of a visual navigation app being developed by Occipital. The app searches for what you’re looking for, plots it inside geo-space and then provides you with directions and a preview of how to get there.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(h/t Techcrunch)

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Friday Fun: Augmented Reality Nearly Here

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Have you got your ticket for Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2009 yet? Only one more day till the price goes up!

This will be the fifth Connect conference that I’ve been been part of and I’m proud of having been able to contribute to the program over the years.

But more importantly, Connect is something that I personally look forward to attending every summer. It’s a great place to meet up with all my friends in the industry and catch up; but I also get a ton out the conversations that spin out of the conference.

Here are 3 things that I’m personally really stoked about seeing this summer’s Connect:

• The Keynote address by Zappos’ COO Alfred Lin;
• The revival of the ConnectTech Workshop;
• Connect Create – The first-ever online real estate developers challenge. 72 hours to build a killer real estate app.

I’m also speaking this year again on a panel called How the Amazon Kindle Will Change Your Business
on Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 pm. So I hope to see you there!

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See the rest here:
Real Estate Connect registration deadline tomorrow

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Realestate.com, the online real estate destination owned by the online mortgage giant LendingTree, rolled out a new sitewide redesign last week.

The new design is clean, fast and eminently usable. And while not as tricked out as some of its competitors, the site is a very capable competitor. Results are returned in a very easy to understand fashion.

However, Realestate.com is not a pure search play. Like its online counterparts Redfin and ZipRealty, it also maintains a number of local offices and a “boots on the ground” (call it “sign in the yard”) brand.

Realestate.com maintains local offices in a dozen or so states across the country.

In addition to the redesign of its search tool, Realestate.com has also launched a community section on their site, which they’re calling Town Square.

Town Square will bring the worlds of online and in-person real estate together in an interactive social community. By visiting Town Square, consumers can access valuable insight from agents, share their experiences, learn about emerging real estate trends and search an A-to-Z encyclopedia about all-things-real estate. For real estate professionals, Town Square offers an opportunity to connect with interested homebuyers and sellers, network with other agents, share tips and best practices and blog about the latest real estate news and happenings in their area.

Frankly, they’re probably a little late to the party to get Realtors to engage in yet another platform; ActiveRain, Zillow, Trulia, Homegain and Realtor.com all offer blogging platforms.

That said, many of those platforms are already saturated with participants and so for folks looking for a new place to stake a claim, Town Square might very well be virgin territory. Especially if Realestate.com can drive some traffic to those conversation.

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Originally posted here:
Realestate.com Goes Social, Launches Town Square

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Real estate technology is headed straight to the small screen.

‘Nuff said.

For more background on this – read some of these earlier posts:

• House Hunting On The Go
• Mobile Real Estate can Thank the iPhone
• Apple Releases SDK Kit for iPhone
• Mobile Real Estate Search Paradigm Just Shifted

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Go here to read the rest:

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Estately has been playing the slow and steady game, but it’s one that I’m increasingly convinced is working out for them.

Today, they announced the addition of their tenth metropolitan market as they bring Atlanta under their fold. Adding 127,000 listings from two Georgia MLS databases, it now brings the total number of properties for sale on Estately.com to over 459,000. In addition to Georgia, Estately covers California, Illinois, New York, Oregon and Washington.

Estately’s search tool is a very robust and impressive product, as I’ve noted a number of times in the past. It’s one of my favorite search destinations on the web. I especially like their transit search tool which calculates a property’s distance from a particular transit line (see Estately Comes to Portland). In Atlanta, you can now do these kind of searches in proximity to the MARTA line.

Estately works on a referral basis – matching pre-screened Realtors with leads coming off its site. When a client who comes from Estately completes a successful transaction, the agent is charged a 20% referral fee. If you’re in any of their markets and want to work with them you can find out more at Estately for Agents.

At this point Estately’s closest parallel is probably Roost (see Roost Redesign Radically Changes Experience) and it’s interesting comparing the two MLS driven sites’ traffic patterns. Seems like there is quite a horse race developing there!

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Continued here:
Estately Heads South

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Gahlord Dewald writes today over on Inman.com about Tweetlister – a new service that helps you market your listings on Twitter.

The main advantage? Tweetlister takes all the listing details you input in to the site and automatically creates a 140 character “tweet” for you and gives you a landing page for the property.

Dewald writes…

With all of the variables and attributes in a real estate property listing, trying to get it shortened to the 140-character limit of a Twitter post can be a challenge. One thing which TweetLister does well is shorten the listing information for you.

You enter the broad-stroke information via pull-down menus and a few text boxes. You can also select a repeating schedule with start and end dates. TweetLister shortens it all into a classified-ad-style Twitter post. Nothing fancy, no snappy copywriting or anything. Just short and simple.

I’m a big fan of any service that makes life easier – but like Nik Nik at MyTechOpinion I had a hard time wrapping my head around Tweetlister initially.  Certainly, using Twitter to promote a property can be an effective way to launch a listing into the conversation — as long as it’s not the only thing you’re tweeting! — but as NikNik said, much of this could easily be accomplished with a URL shortener and link tracking service like Bit.ly.

Also  I think I was reacting to the idea that I’d be using my network to drive traffic to a third party destination. Personally, I’d want to send any visitors to my own website. I suppose if I were a Realtor that didn’t have a personal website that showed off my listings or already own a single-property website for the home, Tweetlister might make an quick and dirty alternative. But I’m betting most readers of this blog are doing at least one of the former however.

That said, combine Tweetlister with service like vFlyer that already does some of the heavy lifting of syndicating listings to multiple destinations online (including social networks like Twitter) and you’ve got a really interesting product. Especially if you roll in all the back end analytics functions that something like vFlyer offers.

As traffic to social networks continue to soar, they do become viable syndication destinations in addition to the real estate portals – but as Gahlord also writes in his piece, “don’t confuse automating your listing promotion via TweetLister with being an engaged social-media-expert real estate professional”. Engaging on Twitter or Facebook or any other social network is a big responsibility – and there are no short cuts there.

For more on how to use Twitter in real estate, check out the Tomato’s post, Twitter Explained for the Real Estate Blogger.

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Originally posted here:
Tweetlister Promotes Properties Over Twitter

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MLS powered search site Roost launched a brand new redesign last week (see Roost.com announces redesign).

Unfortunately, it undid a lot of what I thought made the old site great. But hopefully we only seeing the first iteration of this next generation site and the site will continue to evolve.

Here are a couple things I picked up on:

Speed. The old Roost used to blaze — it was one of the very fastest search tools out there. Search a zip code and the results would pop up very, very quickly. Now it takes a great deal longer for the results page to return and when changing search filters there is a noticeable lag. Hopefully this is just a hiccup in the database that can get optimized over time.

Photos. In the old Roost – photos thumbnails were inline with the results and you could expand the listing to see more images. Now the photos have been moved off to the side and buried below the map. I like the new slide show option but I really couldn’t get over how they seemed to be so hidden on the page – I kept forgetting to look down there as I clicked through listings. To my mind they would be much better above the map in that right rail.

Listing Details. I love that Roost now hosts all the details themselves and doesn’t push you off to a broker site like it used to (see Roost Changes Up Their Game) but the new pop up windows don’t work for me. In fact, I couldn’t even see the listings until I disabled my pop up blocker. Again. hopefully this is only temporary until they can do some kind of inline display like Estately. Also I found it very hard initially to find the View Details button for any listing until I found it at the very bottom right of the page.

Refining Search. Roost’s blades (see Roost Redesigns Search Results) were not universally loved. But they were a novel way to quickly adjust the number of listings you were looking at. Now it took me a few minutes just to figure out how to change the price range, before I spotted Refine Search link next to the search box. Personally I found the green on white text very hard to see.

On the plus side. I did really like the new map search view. You can access that by clicking on the Expand Map link.

In addition to a revamped Roost.com, the company is now offering its search tool to brokers and agents, co-branded of course. So participating partners can benefit from any traffic generated at the main site as well as offer a greater experience to visitors to their own sites.

If they can clear up a few of those nagging issues I mentioned above, I think it could become a very competitive offering to other IDX solutions.

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See original here:
Roost Redesign Radically Changes Experience

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Been thinking you might want to do video?

No better time than the present.

Turnhere has a great special going on right now that gets you a full 2 minute business profile for only $499. Regular price is $899 and the offer is good until June 30. That also gets you a player with embed code, a year’s worth of hosting and distribution to all the major video portals.

Here’s an example of what Turnhere can produce:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of Internet video and at the risk of this whole post coming across as a total pitch, (which, frankly, it’s turning in to), I think Turnhere creates some of the very best videos on the web.

But up until now there really hasn’t been any way to work with them, as their model dictated that they work largely with folks who would buy videos in bulk. This move however is especially interesting since now even the small guys can get in the game.

I stand by my prediction that the adoption of video in real estate stands to radically change the way consumers and the industry interact with each other (see Video Isn’t Just About Your Listings). So there’s still time to hop on this bandwagon.

Of course, you could grab a Flip and shoot this yourself – but personally I’ll bet Turnhere’s “Soup to Nuts” approach is worth the 500 bones. Finally if you’re less of a DIYer but still want some more control over the production; check out WellcomeMat to hook up with a video pro in your area.

Full disclosure: Turnhere is owned by Brad Inman, founder of Inman News.

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See the original post:
Turnhere Lets You Do Video Cheap

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Like it or not, Cyberhomes just really hasn’t caught on like some of it other contemporaries. Technically it’s a very competent site and one that I’ve always thought was definitely under-recognized. I’m guilty myself of forgetting it’s out there somedays.

Part of the problem may be the disjointed approach it has taken to its product over the years – CH has had more homepage redesigns than any other site I know – but it may also just be that it has never really found a good niche to corner. Property valuations, Zillow’s got them licked. Likewise Trulia with search experience, Realtor.com with depth of listings. And Frontdoor’s got them beat editorially.

To date, I hate to say it, there never really was a good reason to go to Cyberhomes.

But they launched a new service last week that might just turn that around.

Called the Market Forecast, Cyberhomes now promises to help you understand where your local market is heading. The report uses Cyberhomes’ unique access to its parent Fidelity’s data on over 40 million loans, and layers on top of that all of its property records and other data sources.

For only $3.99 you can order a 12-month real estate market forecast and housing supply projection, that includes “delinquency and foreclosure trends, a 12-month value projection and summary information about the subject property”.

Brilliant.

I think this could just be the tipping point for a turn around in Cyberhomes’ fortunes. Forget about the past and look to the future (literally). Especially if CH can focus 100% of its marketing efforts towards branding the site as THE destination to go and get the answers to the two most burning questions today; should I sell or should I buy?

There’s their niche.

This could be a winner in my books. Best part is – there is a real revenue model behind this too. Shocking I know. But premium reports can be a real money maker.

Nevertheless, I suspect Cyberhomes has a very short window to execute on this. The other players can reproduce much of what they’ve done and will certainly do so if Cyberhomes starts selling lots of these reports.

There’s no time like the present to change the future.

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Read the original post:
Cyberhomes Looks to the Future for Salvation

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Tune out if you’ve had enough of all the Facebook talk.

Following on the previous posts about Frontdoor’s implementation of Facebook Connect, Hotpads has rolled out a revamped homepage that also features Facebook integration prominently.

As with Frontdoor, you can now login to HotPads using only your Facebook account. The nice thing is Hotpads lets you dive right into into using all of its tools using only your FB credentials.

The upside?

Among other things, you can save favorites to your account, and share them with your friends by sending listings to your friends and/or posting them on your wall.

All fairly standard stuff but what I think this leads us to is a greater recognition and emphasis on the need for collaborative search online. To tap into the social web for recommendations and reassurance when it comes to finding a home.

This is largely an activity that to date has largely only happened offline. Collaborating with a spouse or partner in a house hunt is certainly nothing new, as is passing around a listing sheet or property flyer to friends and family. But you now have a whole breed of web-based applications (Dwellicious also springs to mind) that are helping better enable this activity online.

Using Facebook Connect to grease the wheels of this kind of online collaboration is a smart move for Frontdoor and Hotpads as it’ll presumably (hopefully) get more people using their product. As I mentioned before, it lowers one of the points of friction that exists to prevent people from making the best use of any kind of search experience; an agent or broker’s IDX site, an MLS site, a search portal, whatever.

Signing up for yet another service is tedious. And like it or not, most of us these days have Facebook account. And a lot of us like to talk about real estate.

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Here is the original:
The Move Towards Collaborative Search Online

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The nice folks at Scripps sent me an email fleshing out more detail about Frontdoor’s Facebook Connect integration. I’ve excerpted a few sections below since they give some greater context to the feature.

As you surmised, the Facebook Connect rollout is a work in progress. Truth be told, we’re about 50% finished with the actual rollout and we expect to have everything buttoned up by June 1.

However, there are a few nuances to what is live now that I’d like to point out:

Work in Progress
As you note, a person’s MyFrontDoor and Facebook accounts are not fully integrated yet. This is the final stage of our build that will go live very early June. When that happens, you will be able to authenticate and gain access to certain features more quickly than going through a FrontDoor-only registration process. For example, we’ll be able to pre-populate certain registration fields without a user having to fill those in. That said, there are limitations in their API that will force us to continue to require a select few pieces of information, such as email addresses and zip codes. Email addys are particularly necessary because Facebook doesn’t pass that info along to us and we need that as a backup unique identifier to maintain their account in the event (God forbid) that Facebook should go POOF or somehow alter how Connect works. In any case, however, it will be faster and friendlier with Facebook Connect than without it.

Very cool. Exactly how I would want it to work.

What’s Live Now
Right now our Facebook Connect features allow you to do some subtle, yet key, things:

On every listing on our site there is a Facebook share function. With Connect, that share function becomes much richer than standard FB share functionality (non-FB Connect) that other sites use. For example, with FB connect on FrontDoor, when you click “share” we can pre-populate the share text and personalize it with your name and extend an invitation for your friends to interact with it. The standard non-FB Connect share function simply pulls in meta tags from the site. We think the FB Connect approach makes for a more personal, social experience because it shows a user being actively engaged and we can actively ask for your friends’ feedback.

On the editorial side, you have even more options with the FrontDoor-FB Connect combo. From every article on our site, you can not only share an article (again with personalization), you can also directly update your Facebook status from the right rail of the page. Again, just two more ways to personalize the experience and invite your friends to join in. I invite you to give it a try. We’re pretty sure that all these opportunities create a better environment for sharing without getting in the way of the search / reading experience.

All in all it shows that the FD folks are really thinking this through. I still come back the fact that they are integrating a widely popular social networking tool into their site; to streamline the interaction with the site rather than relying on cumbersome profiles or proprietary user accounts that aren’t portable.

I would love for this approach to be more widely adopted by brokers websites particularly and/or some of the more progressive website vendors. Making your sites easier to interact with. What a concept. Your consumers will thank you for it.

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See more here:
More on Facebook Connect and Frontdoor

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Frontdoor.com, HGTV’s foray into the real estate search space, now lets you sign in to the site (sort of) with your Facebook account.

It’s a great idea in theory, I’m all for lowering the friction points that exist to interact with any site. Sign up processes, while necessary, are often clumsy and time consuming as a user. Letting me use one of existing online profiles through Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect or even OpenID makes that step a breeze. One click and I’m in.

Use of universal logins are in their infancy for sure. OpenID is gaining ground but you may as well use Navajo on your site as far as mainstream consumers are concerned.  So kudos to Frontdoor for taking a step in the right direction. Their product is clearly aimed at the middle of the bell curve consumer rather than the bleeding edge search nerds, so having it connect to Facebook is definitely a smart move.

But unfortunately, in its current state, it doesn’t go far enough. Or anywhere for that matter. As far as I can tell logging in to Frontdoor with my Facebook account (while it was a snap) didn’t really seem to allow me to do much.

In fact, beyond pulling in my avatar at the top of the page, I couldn’t figure out what it did at all.

Personally, I’d love for it to integrate more deeply with the MyFrontdoor account and allow me to share and save properties or save my searches. Right now it seems I still have to sign up for a separate account and even then the two aren’t even linked.

Now it could be this is a limitation of the API. But it would be great if you could integrate your profiles on other social networks into search tools like Frontdoor. If you could post found properties to my profile or to groups of friends inside my existing social graph, for example. How about allowing me to identify promote my own house for sale (if it were) to my wall. How cool would that be?

I like where Frontdoor is going with this. Hopefully we’ll see more to come soon.

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Source:
Frontdoor Now Sports Facebook Connect

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Over the last few years many of the major real estate search sites have moved over to Google Maps from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth as their mapping API of choice (Redfin being the most recent notable defector). HomeGain, Trulia, Homefinder, Estately and others all use Google Maps. But, interestingly, both the #1 and #2 sites; Realtor.com and Zillow, are still Microsoft clients.

Given that, they will likely be interested to hear that Microsoft has announced that they are now rolling in Photosynth technology into the Virtual Earth platform.

Photosynth is a platform that grew out of Microsoft Live Labs (see Next Generation Virtual Tours) and allows for amazing 3D environments (”Synths”) to be stitched together out of 2D photographs.

From the press release:

Photosynth software analyzes digital photographs and generates a 3-D model by “stitching” the photos together. These models, or “synths,” can now be viewed using Silverlight technology across multiple platforms. Virtual Earth brings together features, functionality and content that help consumers, businesses, citizens and governments bring location to life. It helps businesses and governments share location-based information, build better connections with consumers or citizens, and helps organizations make better operational decisions. With the integration of Photosynth into Virtual Earth customers will be able to create detailed 3-D views of anything from places to products and from hotels to homes.

Most recently, it was used to create an immersive view of President Obama’s inauguration on CNN.com called The Moment. (If you haven’t seen it, go check it out – it really is pretty amazing)

Rolling Photosynth in Virtual Earth has some pretty big implications for real estate as one could imagine a developer could take widely available assets (listing photos) and roll them into a pretty nifty 3D representation of a property that’s for sale.

You can see a sample “house Synth” on the Microsoft Virtual Earth site. (Click on the sales sheet for a really slick representation of what’s possible)

Cool factor aside. Whether or not this is a big enough feature to get some of these other sites to switch to VE, that’s another question all together.

Update: Here’s Microsoft’s video on the integration.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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View original here:
Photosynth Could Spark Virtual Earth Comeback

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