homesaledirectory.com Partners With realtytrac.com

homesaledirectory.com, one of the leading home for sale listing websites for buyers and sellers in the US, has announced a partnership that will see realtytrac.com powering a nationwide foreclosure home search on homesaledirectory.com.

“In an effort to continually provide our customers with the most comprehensive real estate listing data available we are pleased to announce this new alliance with realtytrac.com,” said Jason Dittberner, president of homesaledirectory.com. “Home buyers and investors are searching for the best buying opportunities available and this partnership adds yet another valuable resource that homesaledirectory.com can provide to our clients.”

The foreclosure marketplace is one of the few growing areas in real estate at the moment. A statement from the companies about the new partnership says that more than 750,000 homes received a foreclosure notice in the third quarter of 2008, up 71 percent from the third quarter of 2007, according to the realtytrac.com US Foreclosure Market Report.

“Our new partnership with homesaledirectory.com reflects our common goal of providing consumers with real estate services that are in great demand,” said Ari Monkarsh, vice president at realtytrac.com. “We look forward to providing homesaledirectory.com and its valued customers with the most comprehensive foreclosure data available on the Internet.”

realtytrac.com is ranked as the third largest real estate site by MediaMetrix and No. 53 on Inc. magazine’s 2006 Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies.

Established in 1996, realtytrac.com claims to publish the largest and most comprehensive national database of pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, For Sale By Owner, resale and new construction properties, with more than 1 million properties across the country, property reports, productivity tools and extensive professional resources. With 3 million unique visitors monthly it supplies foreclosure data to MSN Real Estate, Yahoo! Real Estate and The Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate Journal.

Diverse Solutions for Social Media

Social media is all the rage and has been for quite some time – it is almost old news.

But what is the real estate industry actually doing about it?

It seems they’re getting serious about social media.

US based Internet marketing and IDX company Diverse Solutions (DS) has announced the appointment of a new Social Media Manager.

Mike Price has joined the DS team with over 12 years of experience serving the industry. In his most recent role as the president of MLBroadcast Mike has established a a firm foothold as a well respected member of the re.net and social media space.

His blog, Mike’s Corner has become a “go-to” guide for real estate marketing advice and opinion. Price is a frequent speaker and of the organizers of the REBarcamp concept, an industry event platform that has spread to cities across the country.

Diverse Solutions write on their blog:

“Diverse Solutions provides a wide range of Real Estate development services to produced inspired, attention-grabbing, easy to use products. Our decision to create Mike’s role was to extend our customer service experience while engaging clients and prospects of DS within the social media channels, extend the Diverse Solutions brand and offer general assistance with development and IDX questions.”

Appropriately, you can follow Diverse Solutions and Mike on Twitter, Facebook, and Active Rain.

Diverse Solutions are certainly not the first or only real estate related company to hire a social media expert. It is, however, an interesting way to start the new year, and it remains to be seen what 2009 holds for the industry and portals in the realm of social media.

fizber.com Partners With condo.com

For sale by owner real estate search engine fizber.com has announced a partnership with condo.com, the world’s largest condo marketplace.

The partnership will let buyers visiting US based fizber.com search for the latest condo listings from condo.com in their local markets and across the country.

fizber.com offers the largest national database of for sale by owner (FSBO), pre-foreclosure, foreclosure, and new home construction properties, with more than 2 million properties across the country. It hosts over 1 million unique monthly visitors. The site offers to list for-sale properties on a multiple listing service for a flat fee, with properties submitted to other property search engines for an additional fee.

condo.com has over 600,000 listings for sale and for rent in the United States and 70 countries and receives over 1 million visitors monthly.

“This new relationship will make it easier for homebuyers, investors and real estate agents and brokers to search and view condo properties on our site,” said Julia Foster, fizber.com VP of Marketing.

Matt Pluznick, VP of Strategic Development for condo.com, added, “This exciting new partnership with fizber.com allows condo.com to reach a brand-new audience of over 1 million potential customers through the seamless distribution of our condo listings to the fizber.com site. This new audience combined with our current condo.com community of over 1 million visitors monthly - and growing - supports our mission to be a huge and valuable resource to the multi-family real estate industry making this partnership ideal.”

In November condo.com announced a partnership with themovechannel.com, which gave condo.com users access to over 10,000+ international properties located in Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, France, Cyprus, England, Italy and more.

TomTom Enters Online Mapping

TomTom, known for its popular GPS, has launched an online mapping solution.

TomTom Route Planner is free and allows door-to-door directions to be mapped for the US and Canada. Of interest to the real estate industry is that it will compete with MapQuest and Google Maps. Some property portals already supply driving directions to properties, in addition to map based search.

The online maps are currently in beta but already have the benefit of TomTom’s live traffic information, smart routing, and “Map Share” daily improvements to accuracy.

In a statement about the Route Planner’s launch, Harold Goddijn, TomTom’s chief executive officer said: “The introduction of the online Route Planner marks an important step in our strategy to make our award-winning navigation available for all users, regardless of the platform that is used. Users who do not have a navigation device can now also benefit from our high-quality routing”.

Depending on the success and feedback from the beta programme, the TomTom online Route Planner will gradually be rolled out to users worldwide.

Only last week propertyportalwatch.com reported on the area of online mapping hotting up, with redfin.com choosing Google Maps over Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.

Meanwhile Google is facing further trouble with its popular but controversial Street View application. A group of Japanese lawyers and professors have asked Google to close down its Street View feature of Google Maps in the country.

homegain.com What If You Could Predict the Future

Almost everyone would like to predict the future, and now you can. Well, almost. You can predict what might happen to the value of your property if you altered or added to your house.

US real estate connection website homegain.com aims to connect home seekers and sellers with agents and brokers. For example, users can compare locate and compare real estate agents, research home values, and view homes for sale. Real estate agents can use it to promote their services and market their business. It also claims to have been one of the first websites that offered free online instant home valuations.

homegain.com has just announced the addition of a new “what if” feature, which keeps them ahead of the game in terms of online valuations.

The “what if” feature allows users to hypothetically add a room(s), bathroom(s) and/or some extra square footage to a home, and see what the changes would do to the value of their home. The what if function recalculates a new estimate, based on the changes.

Home Sale MaximizerTM is an additional tool in the “Get Homes Value” section that helps homeowners determine which home improvements such as home staging, landscaping or painting may best increase the resale values of their homes.

homegain.com’s General Manager, Louis Cammarosano, was quoted on RISmedia as saying:

“Our new ‘what if’ feature gives homeowners an indication of the potential value of their home before they get started on major home renovations. This enables people to make more informed decisions about their home and to plan for the future. Visitors who have questions can directly contact real estate agents in more than 2,100 ZIP codes across the country.”

To see the ‘what if’ application in action, visit: homegain.com/homevalues.

trulia.com Founders on Top 10 Newsmakers List

As part of the annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report that is published each February in the US, the top 10 Newsmakers in Real Estate list is compiled by the company’s research team.

Representing the world of property portals on the top 10 Newsmakers list for 2008 are trulia.com’s founders, Pete Flint and Sami Inkinen, who came in at number nine.

Author of the list, Stefan Swanepoel, blogged about the Top 10, saying of trulia.com:

“As founders of Trulia these two leaders, in spite of the current financial difficulties and the market downturn, continue to go against that flow and have raised funding in the amount of $33 million, which solidifies Trulia as a dotcom company that could survive the economic and/or Web 2.0 downturn to become one of the new paradigm companies to shape the future”.

At number one on the list is William Foley, founder and CEO of Fidelity National Financial (FNF). The company’s real estate division, Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions, provides real estate information, media and technology for homeowners and professionals, including the cyberhomes.com portal.

At number seven is Saul Klein, CEO of Point2 Technologies. And at number eight is Charles McMillan, the 2009 President of the National Association of REALTORS.

Newsmakers are defined by the company as those people that during the year made headlines as individuals, as a result of their actions and leadership of the companies or associations they are involved with in the real estate industry.

The second list to be released is the Top 10 Events Impacting on Real Estate for 2008. Among the key events for 2008 are: the election, ActiveRain reaching 100,000 members, twitter, NAR celebrating 100 years and, of course, the bailout, which comes top of the list.

Find out more about the Swanepoel TRENDS Report at their website: retrends.com

Strategies for Tough Times Workshop

In today’s tough business and financial climate, property portals around the world face challenging issues. These can include:

• Where can I cut costs to ride out the financial storm?
• Can I really compete with the market leaders?
• Where do I get my next injection of funding?
• Will the free to list models really work?
• What impact will Google have on portal sites?
• What new products are coming and should portal sites invest in them?

Answering these and other vital questions alone is not easy, so we thought we would hold a workshop to discuss them as a group.  Property Portal Watch has teamed with the folk at Inman News to create Property Portal Watch Connect – a free, one day workshop for the owners and operators of property portals from around the world.

Read more

zillow.com Gives Free Advice

US based property valuation site and portal zillow.com has added a new user-based advice feature to its website.

Zillow Advice combines the old Home Q&A and discussion forums into one Advice section where users can ask questions which are answered by other users in the zillow.com online community.

The new feature was revealed by David Gibbons, zillow.com’s director of community relations, in a blog post. It is designed to give users access to the 1.2 million agents, lenders and other professionals who use Zillow each month. Gibbons wrote:

“Zillow visitors post 40,000 contributions to the site each day. Many of those are Home Q&A, Real Estate Guides and Discussions. These features now live under a new Advice tab and we are adding local Questions to the list of ways in which Zillow users can help each other.”

It brings zillow.com in line with rival trulia.com, who offer a similar Q+A forum through Trulia Voices Real Estate Community.

Zillow.com came out number three in the Hitwise November 2008 top 10 US real estate websites. trulia.com has been rising rapidly, and came in at number 11.

In a blog by John Cook on Techflash, he quotes interesting compete.com data that shows a dip in traffic for both zillow.com and trulia.com in recent months.

ziprealty.com Introduces Realius Community Estimator

US brokerage firm ziprealty.com, which came number 4 in terms of market share for real estate websites in the latest November Hitwise figures, has taken a big step forward and introduced community estimating technology to its website.

There’s no doubt it is going to be a controversial application, but also one with a lot of potential for revolutionalising the sales process and the experience of users browsing properties online.

The technology is courtesy of a company called Realius, who describe it as a price prediction widget, with read-write capabilities and user state management, making it more complex than most data widgets you see on real estate websites. Realius were also responsible for real estate pricing games that hit the market earlier this year.

Basically, it will mean that any user can note what they think any ziprealty.com listing is worth, and any other user will be able to see what others have said the listing is worth. The technology makes the sales process quite transparent, showing what people really think a property’s value is.

The application joins of host of others that ziprealty.com have embraced for their 1.3 million home listings. They were the first to include one-click driving directions to multiple homes, have extensive neighbourhood and school data, home sale data and satellite images of properties.

geekestateblog.com reminded us that Ziprealty launched a “Price Me Now” sub domain back in July, but the introduction of the Realius technology has taken it a step further, allowing anyone to predict a price, and linking it directly to the listing.

It makes propertyportalwatch.com wonder what the community pricing technology’s scope might be – will other brokerages or property portals be keen to introduce a similar function?

realtor.com Still On Top

Of the 3,194 real estate websites Hitwise tracked in November realtor.com came out number one in terms of US market share, retaining its top dog status.

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