Real Estate Blog

MRIS, the MLS which covers DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and the Virginias and is the nation’s largest MLS, today launched HomesDatabase 2.0, its new public-facing web site.

It’s a pretty impressive effort. HomeDatabase takes its design cues from some of the big listing portals (Zillow and Trulia) but merges it with the extensive listing data available from its own databases, and effectively beating them at their own game.

Though, as pointed out by Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman (who himself operates in MRIS’ service area) in a comment on Techcrunch, it’s not the total market picture. HomesDatabase excludes foreclosures, bank-owned properties or for sale by owner from its results.

Despite that shortcoming, it is still a very nice search experience. Some of the notable features present in HomesDatabase are, foremost, its support for semantic search. Like Dothomes, you can do a natural-language query on the site, like this search I did for a colonial in Annapolis with a pool.

Personally, I also really liked the gallery view - which puts all the properties side by side and allows you to evaluate multiple properties from an esthetic point of view. HomesDatabase also apparently allows you to put selected properties into a “comparison engine” - but I was unable to figure out how to get to this feature.

Another nice touch were the “Amazon-like” recommendations on the listing pages of similar type properties viewed by other users.

As a pure search tool, Home Database drives all traffic back to the listing brokerage or the listing agent for free. MRIS believes that by creating a compelling destination it can help its members better service their customers, the consumers while, at the same time, consumers are looking for a trusted third party to help them find their next home.

MRIS chairman Adam Cockey puts it this way; “Consumers get easy access to all the listings without advertising. And real estate brokers and agents in our market get free exposure and traffic from a site that’s run by their own MLS.”

Not a bad deal in my mind.

mris, homesdatabase, real estate 2.0, real estate search

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MRIS Takes on the Search Sites

Properazzi, the international property search portal based in Barcelona, Spain, announced today it has changed its name to Enormo.

They felt “that the new name will reflect our ambitions better and support our continuing growth”.

I actually liked the old name a lot (see Properazzi Takes a Snapshot of Europe’s Real Estate Market) and the new name doesn’t do all that much for me, yet. It feels kind of generic, and unrelated to real estate — but then again, who knew what a Zillow was before they launched.

Enormo claims to be the largest property listings web site in the world. They have over 2 million monthly visitors and lists over 6 million properties in 50 countries worldwide, including the USA.

US brokers and agents wanting to reach their international audience are encouraged by the company to submit their listing feeds.

enormo, properazzi, real estate search, global real estate, web 2.0

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Go Big or Go Home

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google just announced you can now use Google Earth on your iPhone. This is huge.

With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of our 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

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It’s available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store.

This is a radical new way to interact with a virtual world and it blew me away when I loaded it on my iPhone.

Google Earth has always been a fantastic environment, perfect for real estate search (see Navigating a Virtual World). But it was always hampered by the mouse and click mechanics necessary with the desktop version. Pairing it with the iPhone’s amazing touchscreen and gesture recognition capabilities makes perfect sense.

While this initial release only permits certain data sources — Wikipedia and Panaramio, to name a few — imagine being able to import a property search via a KML file or better yet, layer in live neighborhood information, real estate market data or listings from Google Base.

Do that and it’s not too far of a leap to think that the iPhone or iPod touch, combined with the 3D environment presented in Google Earth, could very well become the mobile real estate search mechanism of choice.

You can download Google Earth for your iPhone or iPod touch through the iTunes App Store.

Update: A couple of tips I figured out: Use a two-finger drag up and down to tilt view vertically. Two finger twist rotates the viewing angle.

iphone, google earth, real estate search

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Mobile Real Estate Search Paradigm Just Shifted

Globrix, the UK based, News International backed real estate search site announced this week it will be making the move in to the United States in early 2009.

They are following the footsteps of early leader Dothomes, which announced its US expansion in April of this year (see DotHomes is in the Running).

According to the article on GlobalEdge, Globrix expects to bring its free-to-list business model to US Realtors looking to feature properties to overseas buyers and already has (unnamed) US partners in place. The Globrix Blog confirms these plans.

Globrix is currently one of my favorite international property search portals (see Globrix Takes Aim at UK Property Listings), mainly due to its clean interface and super speedy search results. I’m looking forward to seeing whether this move will shake up the relatively static nature of the US search scene.

It also remains to be seen whether US brokers and agents will embrace yet another destination to syndicate their listings to - but the international angle that Globrix brings might very well be enough to push them over the edge.

More coverage:

• Renthusiast: Look out America, here comes Globrix!

Technorati Tags: globrix, real estate search, real estate 2.0, web 2.0

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The British Are Coming (Again)

High profile Finnish search portal Igglo.fi is gone. Kaput.

The company was founded in February 2006 by entrepreneurs Jussi Nurmio and Mikko Ranin and in 2006 Benchmark Capital Europe invested 12.5 million euros in Igglo to help them fund their expansion deep into Europe.

But that investment now looks all for naught, as Igglo declared bankruptcy in February 2008 (see Wikipedia) and just last week, according to Forbes.com, ceased its brokerage operations and sold its web site to Finnish publishing house Sanoma Group.

Igglo was one of the very first online brokers and web sites to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies, winning it many fans at the time, including Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman who sought to be bring Igglo’s novel auction idea to the US (see Redfin Corporate Blog).

The news that Igglo has exhausted its capital and folded, is not particularly comforting then. And I wonder if it’s just the tip of a cresting wave for many of the venture-funded real estate plays both here and abroad.

That said, it may not be the last time we see Igglo. According to Sanoma’s press release on the acquistion, Nurmio insists “Igglo will focus on its core competence, developing online business and internationalizing the service. This transaction provides Igglo with an excellent platform to take the housing portal concept abroad.”

Continued here:
Sign of the Times? Igglo Melts Away

Maybe it’s the dominant position that MLS.ca (recently rebranded as Realtor.ca) occupies in the market, but real estate search north of the border seems to have been stuck revving in neutral for a while.

Zoocasa is a new free Canadian real estate search engine that aims to kick it in to gear. Zoocasa covers the Canadian market from coast to coast and marries real estate search with research tools, like neighborhood guides and listing comparisons that are aimed at home buyers.

The site does a few things really well. The search queries are fast and results are returned quickly. The site’s pale blue, Web 2.0 palette is a little predictable but not obnoxious.

Individual listing pages map the home with the obligatory Google map and the expected property details (only one photo however!). A unique touch is their Commute Cost Calculator, where you can punch in the address of your work, the fuel consumption of your vehicle and average cost per litre of gas and Zoocasa will return an estimated average fuel bill for your commute.

US search site Estately recently introduced the ability for people to search for homes along transit lines (see Estately Comes to Portland) and we see services like Walkscore that calculate the walkability of particular neighborhoods (see Measuring Walkability with Walk Score). It seems, for a certain segment of the population, these sorts of environmental factors are weighing in on the decision making process.

On a similar note, I wonder if at some point we’ll see Energy costs alongside Property Taxes in the listing details. And how long it will be till we see search sites that allow us to filter out McMansions from our real estate searches (see Are McMansions Making Some Americans Unhappy?)

The only problem with Zoocasa is that its database of homes is pretty slim, probably since it has been cobbled together by indexing brokers sites.

For example, a search in Vancouver, BC:

• REALTOR.ca (MLS driven) pulls up around 5500 homes for sale
• Zoocasa pulls up only 2481 for sale.

Also unclear is the site’s business goals. Other than display advertising there doesn’t seem to be a clear revenue model, though I suspect if the site builds enough traffic amongst Canadian consumers, we’ll eventually see the same sponsored listings and zip code sponsorships its US counterparts display.

Despite it’s glossy Web 2.0 shine and its solid performance - Zoocasa is going to have a hard time knocking MLS.ca off its perch. That said, if it can jump start a better search experience for Canadian consumers (Century21.ca is about the only other decent search experience I’ve found) then the race may be on.

Read more from the original source:
Zoocasa Takes on MLS.ca Dominance

Word leaked that #1 Real Estate Blog Curbed.com is getting into the listings game a couple of weeks ago. As of today, the new service is live in Manhattan.

Curbed’s new Marketplace lets Realtors and brokers list their properties inside a traditional classifieds-type environment. For 99 bucks you’ll be able to reach out to some of Curbed’s 300,000 loyal readers.

The price is right, but it remains to be seen whether those readers will take the leap and move beyond their RSS readers to dig for listings inside the Marketplace.

More interesting however, is what Curbed is calling its QuickListings - which are advertorial-type property listings that are inserted into Curbed’s blow flow. Call them Sponsored Posts, but since Curbed generally treats listings as content anyway, this approach does not seem so incongruous.

The more I think about it, I like this approach a lot. As a broker or agent, your listing gets top billing and placement rather than being buried in the back pages. As the publisher, Curbed has already warmed its readers to receiving information they may be interested in. Readers will appreciate the clear deliniation between the editorial and advertising but may also appreciate the relevance of the content.

Newspapers, especially those who still have local real estate sections, would be wise to watch was Curbed is doing. It’s to these sorts of ideas that those fleeing advertising dollars will be going.

The only question I would have as a marketer is what sort of analytics are baked into the Marketplace and QuickListings - can I get reports how many times my item was viewed, what the CTR (click-thru rates) were? Even a geographic breakdowns of who was viewing my listing from where? Having that sort of information would make this product a home-run.

Coincidentally, Trulia launched a blogging platform last week, which makes for the very odd situation where you have a real estate blog is getting in to the property listings game and a propety listings portal getting into the real estate blogging game. Worlds are starting to collide here.

Will we soon be seeing featured listings inside Trulia Voices too?

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Curbed Quicklistings Puts Listings in Blog Flow

Despite a faltering property market, the market for UK based real estate search sites seems as resilient as ever.

In addition to propertyfinder.com, HotProperty.co.uk, Nestoria, Zoomf, DOTHOMES and perrenial top dog Rightmove, you’ve got new(ish) entries like Globrix.com, a site that was launched in January 2008 and is backed by Rupert Murdoch’s News International (a subsidiary of News Corporation, better known on these shores as the owner of FOXNews).

Globrix is clean, intuitive and Roost-like in its speed and simplicity. It also sports one of the simpliest landing pages I’ve seen - an approach that seems to have been eshewed by many of Globrix’s US counterparts. REALTOR.com, Zillow, Trulia seem bent on loading as much information as possible on to their home pages, and end up just overwhelming me.

Unlike Roost however, who introduced new filtering “blades” recently in order to clean up their search results (see Roost Redesigns Search Results), Globrix has managed to keep its search results pages tidy with a nice use of tabs and filter windows along the left column.

One nice touch is the price sliders at the top of the results page, which graphically represent the volume of homes for sale in any given market (a search of my former haunt Leatherhead shows that the bulk of the listings fall in the £300K range, for example). Makes it easy to see instantly how many listings fall into your price range and moreover, where the average list price for the area falls.

Globrix sources its listings from agents and brokers and sends the traffic directly to them if a consumer wants more information, with no intermediary “property detail” pages. It’s a convenient relationship but one that means that the results on Globrix are pretty bare bones. The experience for the consumer is restrained, and it would be nice, for example, to see more than one photo of the property on the site.

That said, it should be noted that Globrix is a pure search play (no blogs, community, q&a and other fancy features to clutter up the site) and their business model, like that of Google, is simply selling premium advertising placement around the results.

The hope is that through their own marketing efforts (it has a “significant multiple million pound budget to spend on marketing the site to consumers” this year) they can significantly grow the site’s brand awareness amongst UK buyers (and resulting traffic) and command top-tier advertising rates.

Presumably it will leverage its major media connections (like Frontdoor has) at some point too to help drive that awareness. In fact, that seems to be the case as Times Online recently dumped Propertyfinder in favor of Globrix.

One has to wonder too, as these big media corporations world wide begin to leverage more of their assets to build high-concept online real estate search tools, whether we’ll see more of that happening (or perhaps even some acquisitions) here.

More here:
Globrix Takes Aim at UK Property Listings

The real estate application category on the iPhone seems to be filling out. When the upgraded version of the launched in July, Pulawai was the only real estate specific search tool (see 5 Apps Every Real Estate Agent Should Have on Their iPhone).

But that’s now changing and it looks like there is an epic battle brewing for screen space on my phone.

Trulia iPhone application

Trulia’s app is notable because of the prominence they give to open houses on the home screen. I think this is a wise choice, since people will likely be using this app as they are out and about and will want to find out what’s open near them to go have a look.

The search experience was very easy on Trulia’s app - simply pushing the ‘All homes for sale’ button takes you to a list of all the properties near you. (Your definition of “All Homes” may vary).

Searching all homes, it was a bit frustrating because wasn’t immediately obvious how the results we returned - it didn’t seem to be sorted by price or even distance away. Using the Custom Search option does let you get a little more specific on how those results are returned however.

Personally, I would have loved to be able to refine the search from the All Homes results page to weed out the listings that didn’t fit what I was looking for. Unfortunately instead, Trulia makes you go back to the beginning and start over again.

The biggest disappointment with Trulia’s app however are the listing pages themselves. Next to Utopria’s offerings they pale in comparison (see
Utopria Brings Property Listings to iPhone) Only one photo? Also, it’s great that you can show me where the property is on a map, but what does staring at a pin from space really tell me? I want a little more.

StreetEasy Real Estate

StreetEasy doesn’t waste any time. The New York based real estate site just takes you right into the search results as soon as you fire it up. I actually kind of enjoyed this - the less decisions I have to make up front the better. Let me get right to the meat and then let me start carving away.

(Though I have to say, the fact that the top listing it returned on its default search was an $80 million, 4 bedroom Central Park apartment made me feel more than a little bit inadequate.)

Clicking on the Edit Search button lets you refine the results and StreetEasy makes good use of the iPhone UI elements to make the refinement easy and enjoyable - lots of tumblers to spin up and down. Making search fun is one of the things the iPhone can be great at.

On the whole, StreetEasy succeeds where Trulia fails - showing you all the photos associated with a particular listing. Clicking on the thumbnail floats all the images upwards to a gallery like environment you can thumb through. I also loved the fact that the app lets you pull up the details on the building that a particular apartment is in.

Further, StreetEasy makes it really easy to tab between the listing description, the map and the agent’s contact information. Trulia struggles to accomplish this with a slightly clumsy popup menu.

HomeFinder

HomeFinder was created by developer Brandon Alexander (Alexander Mobile) and claims to bring over 4 million listings to the iPhone. Listings are drawn from Google Base, FSBO websites and feeds from several large MLSes and brokerages (not identified).

Compared to the two previous offerings, it’s pretty bare-bones, yet functional. HomeFinder gives you loads of options to filter a search - but it also kept crashing whenever it returned the results. So I’m going to have to withhold judgement on this app until we see a new revision.

So what’s the verdict?

StreetEasy’s iPhone app blows the competition out of the water in terms of ease-of-use, functionality and sheer slickness. Unfortunately it’s only available in New York City.

Trulia’s app looks great, gets off to a good start and then falls flat on its face. Frankly disappointing and hopefully future versions will add some of the missing features.

The others (Puluwai and HomeFinder) well, compared to their commercial competitors, feel unpolished and struggle due to poor data sources.

So for now, there’s no clear winner. Unless you live in New York.

Source:
iPhone Real Estate App Showdown

Simon Baker, former CEO of Australian REA Group, has launched a new web site he’s calling Property Portal Watch. From his blog:

Property Portal Watch will be the one stop shop for all information on property portals around the word. It is designed to provide news, views, rumours, overviews and general information on property portal sites throughout the world. In addition it will provide tips and techniques for those wanting to advertise online. Its first incarnation is as a blog (while i get the proper site built).

Simon helped build REA Group into a truly global real estate search powerhouse that now has operations in 10 countries. It owns 22 websites, eight print publications and its web sites have over 8 million unique visitors each month.

Given that background, I’m sure there will be some great info coming out of there. For anyone who’s interested in watching the Real Estate 2.0 space - make sure you give it a visit and subscribe.

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New International Property Portal Site Launched