Real Estate Blog

Don’t call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin’ my peers
Puttin’ suckers in fear
- LL COOL J, Momma Said Knock You Out

Neighborhood research sites come and go. But none of them have seemed to stick around for very long.

Word that Homethinking has added some very cool neighborhood matching tools excites me as a technology watcher, but I have to wonder, sadly, if it will ever get used.

On the surface neighborhood research seems to make perfect sense. People should want to learn more about the neighborhood they want to live in. What are the schools in the area? How do they perform? How close is the nearest Starbucks? How walkable is the neighborhood (see Measuring Walkability with Walk Score)?

But the graveyard of neighborhood research tools is also littered with recent attempts to make this work.

The ghosts of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research) and Neighborhoodmatch (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) still haunt us. High profile plays like YourStreet that are still with us have radically shifted gears (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) - and even Terabitz switched its focus to becoming an enterprise web site provider.

Still, that doesn’t stop others from trying:

Homezilla

Homezilla is a new site north of the border that takes on neighbourhood (Canadian spelling, natch) search. The overall experience is pretty usable - results are dynamically generated and plotted on a Google Map. I really liked how you can layer in different data sources and that there were several ‘unique’ choices I could pick; the availability of liquor stores and bars were especially appreciated.

Problem is - the data was poor to terrible. A search in my old neighborhood in Vancouver revealed neither the elementary school I went to nor any of the pubs that I frequented later in life.

Nevertheless, I liked the experience. Largely because Homezilla continues the encouraging trend of search tools adding ‘real world’ filters that people can actually use in their searches; like proximity to transit options (see Estately Comes to Portland).

(Speaking of which, would one of the search portals please layer in access to FIOS and/or 3G cellular coverage as a search criteria. Geeks like me who are looking for a new home demand it.)

UpMyStreet

UpMyStreet is a British web site that tries a slightly different approach - rather than a fancy map mashup, UpMyStreet parses all of its neighborhood data into paragraph form. It creates a much more academic experience but one that is frankly, a bit muddled. I found it a bit confusing to navigate and the advertising very distracting.

That said, it was a tool that I could see myself using - at least tangentially alongside another search site.

The problem with any of these sites, may very well be that neighborhood research is only a small and limited part of the real estate search process for some (if at all) and one that is quickly overtaken by the hunt for a specific home.

And so I suspect that without having listing data attached to the site, a dedicated neighborhood search tool simply can not go very far.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for this type of information. I just think it means it’s up to the property search sites to do a better job of helping consumers decide which neighborhoods fit their needs.

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Excerpted from:
Neighborhood Search Comes Back

Don’t call it a comeback
I been here for years
Rockin’ my peers
Puttin’ suckers in fear
- LL COOL J, Momma Said Knock You Out

Neighborhood research sites come and go. But none of them have seemed to stick around for very long.

Word that Homethinking has added some very cool neighborhood matching tools excites me as a technology watcher, but I have to wonder, sadly, if it will ever get used.

On the surface neighborhood research seems to make perfect sense. People should want to learn more about the neighborhood they want to live in. What are the schools in the area? How do they perform? How close is the nearest Starbucks? How walkable is the neighborhood (see Measuring Walkability with Walk Score)?

But the graveyard of neighborhood research tools is also littered with recent attempts to make this work.

The ghosts of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research) and Neighborhoodmatch (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) still haunt us. High profile plays like YourStreet that are still with us have radically shifted gears (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) - and even Terabitz switched its focus to becoming an enterprise web site provider.

Still, that doesn’t stop others from trying:

Homezilla

Homezilla is a new site north of the border that takes on neighbourhood (Canadian spelling, natch) search. The overall experience is pretty usable - results are dynamically generated and plotted on a Google Map. I really liked how you can layer in different data sources and that there were several ‘unique’ choices I could pick; the availability of liquor stores and bars were especially appreciated.

Problem is - the data was poor to terrible. A search in my old neighborhood in Vancouver revealed neither the elementary school I went to nor any of the pubs that I frequented later in life.

Nevertheless, I liked the experience. Largely because Homezilla continues the encouraging trend of search tools adding ‘real world’ filters that people can actually use in their searches; like proximity to transit options (see Estately Comes to Portland).

(Speaking of which, would one of the search portals please layer in access to FIOS and/or 3G cellular coverage as a search criteria. Geeks like me who are looking for a new home demand it.)

UpMyStreet

UpMyStreet is a British web site that tries a slightly different approach - rather than a fancy map mashup, UpMyStreet parses all of its neighborhood data into paragraph form. It creates a much more academic experience but one that is frankly, a bit muddled. I found it a bit confusing to navigate and the advertising very distracting.

That said, it was a tool that I could see myself using - at least tangentially alongside another search site.

The problem with any of these sites, may very well be that neighborhood research is only a small and limited part of the real estate search process for some (if at all) and one that is quickly overtaken by the hunt for a specific home.

And so I suspect that without having listing data attached to the site, a dedicated neighborhood search tool simply can not go very far.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a need for this type of information. I just think it means it’s up to the property search sites to do a better job of helping consumers decide which neighborhoods fit their needs.

Ad: Reach over 4500 readers in FOREM’s feed. Place your ad here.

Read the rest here:
Neighborhood Search Comes Back

In what is likely the first of many more of these sorts of announcements in the real estate space, Redfin is laying off 20% of their employees.

In a post on its company blog yesterday, Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman explained that the company’s bottom line was hit by market conditions that “wiped out prospective down-payments, tours and offers [that] dropped 30%”.

It surely must have been a tough decision, but kudos to Kelman for taking immediate and decisive steps to react to the change in the market — and for being so openly transparent about the process.

Because of the transactional nature of its business, Redfin is most certainly feeling the pain much sooner than some of its contemporaries - but I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg, as more Real Estate 2.0 startups start to feel the pinch of the slowing economy.

In a story on Inman News today, research firm Borrell Associates is “forecasting that annual growth in real estate-related online advertising will slow to 11.3 percent in 2008 and 5.1 percent next year.” For sites pinning their hopes on advertising revenue, it looks like that might be drying up as well.

More coverage:

• agentgenius.com
• Where are John and Todd?

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Original post:
Redfin Downsizes To Keep Swimming

Portland MLS Changes Rules on Address Display.

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View original here:
Hallelujah

In a move reminiscent of the current US election campaigns, Roost, the MLS-driven real estate search engine released a series of YouTube videos today showing how its results best those returned by Trulia, Google and Yahoo.

Check ‘em out.

Trulia
Click here to view the embedded video.

Google
Click here to view the embedded video.

Yahoo
Click here to view the embedded video.

Roost’s conclusion? That using these sites “homebuyers waste tons of time searching through homes that aren’t actually for sale.”

The company, which previously released a commission report claiming its search superiority (see Quantity, quality vary at real estate search sites), seems to be hammering relentlessly on this point. It remains to be seen whether it’s a message that resonates with consumers however.

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Excerpt from:
Roost Goes Negative

photo by Ewan-M

Reposted from Inman News blog:

UK readers, mark your calendars. On October 16th in London, industry professionals will be gathering with Inman News publisher Bradley Inman at 6pm at the Windmill Pub in Mayfair. It’s being hosted by the good folks at Nestoria and you can read more about the gathering on the following blogs: Nestoria Blog, theRatandMouse, Globrix Blog and Renthusiast.

Similar meetups will be held in the following European capitals:

Amsterdam - October 23rd (stay tuned to nieuwbouw20 for details)

Paris - October 27th

Berlin - Date TBA.

We hope to see you there! If you have any questions about any of these events; please feel free to email joel [at] inman.com.

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Read more from the original source:
Inman News Heads to Europe

Compiled by the folks at GlobalEdge, a list of the top 100 bloggers and real estate journalists from around the world makes up The GlobalEdge Top 100.

Their methodology, from their site:

This list was compiled by searching Google’s top 100 results using terms like “real estate blog” and “property news”. In this respect it is biased towards English-language sites. We also searched the blog rolls of some of the biggest blogs in the UK, US and to a lesser extent the rest of the world to add to the list. It took us several weeks to compile a list of over two hundreds sites. We then used the SEOMoz Trifecta tool to rank the importance and notoriety of the sites most relevant web page (we link to the page we ranked).

As a result, the list is a curious mishmash of news sources, portals, blogs and other web-based sources but interesting nonetheless. I picked up a number of new sites I’d never seen before.

This blog comes in at #35 and it’s nice to see some other familiar faces in the mix too; Geek Estate Blog, Saint Paul Real Estate Blog, the Tomato and the Phoenix Real Estate Guy to name just a few.

Looking for some more international flavor for your readers? Check out  The Rat & Mouse for peek into the UK Market, the always interesting Renthusiast and, for slice of Oz, Business2.com.au.

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More:

Not a dedicated app, mind you. But if you visit ColdwellBanker.com on your iPhone’s Safari browser now it’ll pull up a specially formatted version of the site.

They’re not the first company to do this (Realtor.com has an iPhone-ready page, as does Intero) but they are, as far as I know, the first to launch a major marketing campaign advertising this fact.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The app itself looks great and is nicely thought out and pretty functional. You can search for current listings and, like Trulia (see iPhone Real Estate App Showdown), open houses as well. Search results return reasonably quickly on both WiFi and 3G.

The individual listing pages are fleshed out, though not as tightly integrated with multimedia as Utopria’s (see Utopria Brings Property Listings to iPhone). You can see all the photos associated with the home however. Clicking on Map Property link will bring you immediately to the Google Maps application for driving directions.

Unfortunately, because it’s not a dedicated app, the overall usability of this function gets a bit frustrating. Getting back to your search results requires several taps back and forth to switch between the map and the browser.

Also, CB’s tool does not seem to tap into the iPhone’s location awareness capability which seems a bit of a shame - you still need to tell it where you want to search.

Probably the biggest issue however is that (perhaps not surprisingly) ColdwellBanker.com on the iPhone only returns CB listings. Unfortunately, this severely limits the app’s use for consumers and as a result I can’t see many people turning to this tool beyond mere curiousity.

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Read the rest here:
Coldwell Banker Launches iPhone App

At the recent TechCrunch50 event, Japanese company TonchiDot demo’d its new iPhone application called Sekai Camera to wild enthusiasm.

TonchiDot’s idea is to use the iPhone camera and location awareness as a mobile information interface. Using the Sekai Camera application you can tag real-world locations and simultaneously view the tags shared by other users - Tonchidot calls it “Air Tagging”.

It’s a heady concept and to really understand how it works, you need to watch this video:
Click here to view the embedded video.

I love their slogan that ‘Real space is the new interface to the Internet’. Kind of mind blowing when you think about it.

And it brings up obvious applications for real estate. Imagine a real world property tour (boots on the ground, walking through a home) where you could instaneously access Zestimates or property data, read individual tags on the features in a room or listen to audio clips describing the amenities through the Sekai Camera terminal.

It’s still a few years away of course. But a very cool glimpse into the future nevertheless.

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Read more:
TonchiDot Tags Your World

photo by paulhitz

A weak dollar and fire sale prices have all led to strong interest in US real estate market by foreign buyers.

Whether it’s Russian oil billionaires in Manhattan, Asian buyers on the West Coast or Canadians seeking warmer climes in Phoenix, international investors are eying US properties these days and US Realtors are perking up to that demand.

Trulia, which has enjoys decent international traffic, is now making an active push to help those agents reach those potential buyers (see How Can I Reach out to International Home Buyers?).

In principal this is not terribly unique, since most ad platforms offer
some sort of geo-targeting capability. As an advertiser on Trulia you can now opt to display specific ads only to Trulia’s international visitors.

For example, a San Francisco based Realtor might want to run a Chinese language ad to Chinese visitors or, alternatively, a Phoenix based Realtor might want to run a Beer and Hockey themed ad to Canadian visitors. (Go ‘nucks!)

The real challenge is going to be get the right messaging and in many cases, get the advertisement and listing information translated into the appropriate. Immobel is one company that offers translation services for real estate.

I think it’s smart for Trulia to position themselves as US based alternative for Realtors looking to market overseas.

There are other international-based options out there (GlobalEdge maintains a great list and so does Simon Baker’s Property Portal Watch) but this is the first dedicated effort I’ve seen by a local portal to tap that need.

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View post:
Trulia Lets You Go Global

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

photo by other war

Yawn.

Don’t get me wrong. I think a Zillow Ad Network makes some sense.

And unlike Valleywag, who calls it a “desperate ploy to make sales numbers,” I do see some value in publishers aggregating their advertising inventory for potential real estate advertisers.

I’ll go on the record, I don’t think this is a Hail Mary pass for the Seattle-based search site.

…But it has been done before. Trulia launched a similar deal earlier this year. And, as Valleywag points out, vertical ad networks are a dime-a-dozen these days.

More worrying to me is that it feels like Zillow has lost its edge.

The take-no-prisoners approach Zillow had when it launched now feels anachronistic. The whole thing now feels mainstream. The fire is gone.

Honestly - I had not been to the site for a while. But I went to Zillow.com today and when I got there I was surprised. Is it just me, or is the whole thing looking slightly more subdued now?

Scrolling mortgage rates, a big search box (and hey, where’d the Zestimates go?)… yawn.

What makes me sad is what Zillow represented when it launched was a big inspiration for me to starting this blog.

It was about thinking big and challenging well-entrenched assumptions. It was a big, ballsy play and ultimately, it was aspirational, however controversial it may have been. It was technology unsaddled by expectations. It was the future of real estate marketing.

So it saddens me to see one of the Real Estate 2.0 leaders tack to the center and become generic. But maybe it’s the current business cycle that is forcing Zillow’s hand.

More deeply however, I guess what I’m really sad about is the whole site now just feels… well, kind of boring.

Yawn.

I, for one, hope they can find that fire again.

Excerpted from:
Is Real Estate 2.0 a Thing of the Past?

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?

See the original post here:
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