Taking a page from the its search portal cousins and perhaps even its cross-town competitor Redfin, the new Windermere web site launched today, with a simple search box up front and center. Simple, slick and straight to the point.

Broker web pages are often cluttered with all kinds of extraneous information; programs on this and that. Windermere cuts right to the chase and puts the power of its IDX driven search tool up front and center. Just what I’m looking for.

Better still, the search experience gets even better once you dive in. Results return speedily are mapped quickly onto a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. Clicking on a individual listing and you get a nice big picture as well as the ability to read the entire property details, view all existing photos and print out a ready-to-roam flyer.

I suspect this is the model for the brokerage web site moving forward. A simple, interactive online destination that supplies the consumer with the complete search experience. If Windermere takes this to the next level and white-labeled this tool for its agents, they’d be on to a winning combination.

Windermere serves the Western US, in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington state and Wyoming.

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For real estate buyers right now it’s a crazy time. The fear of making the wrong decision can be paralyzing at times, so having access to information is critical.

I thought I’d share some of the tools I’ve been using in my own search.

What’s Happening on the Ground?

Trulia.com

Trulia generates its reports from its internal database of property listings (most of which are pulled from its relationships with real estate brokers). Inventory is admittedly incomplete, but it’ll give you a good sense of the trajectories of the local markets.

Cyberhomes.com

Cyberhomes, on the other hand, gets its data from its records on over
100 million US properties. Their neighborhood overviews are a little slow to load but can give you a overview of what a zip code is doing and see the overall direction of the market.

Get the Big Picture?

Altos Research

Altos reports are real time market intelligence that deep dive in to what’s really going on in your market, right now. As a buyer, you can also get a snapshot of the trends in any given market. Altos founder Mike Simonsen claims their reports lead the Case/Shiller Index by three months.

Foreclosures

Understanding the volume of foreclosures, bank owned properties and auctions that are hitting your is key to gauging where prices might be headed in your local market.

RealtyTrac

The 800lb gorilla in the foreclosure space. RealtyTrac has a fantastic amount of information despite a clunky web site. There is a monthly charge to have access to this data - but it’s well worth it, especially if you’re looking at these opportunities seriously.

ForeclosureRadar.com

California buyers may want to look at ForeclosureRadar, a “professional grade” search tool that tracks all foreclosure activity in the state. Designed mostly for Realtors and investors, it’s a fantastic tool that gives you unparalleled data and analysis. Too bad it’s not available outside of the Golden State, yet.

Bonus - Find Homes on Auction

Also, if you’re interested in getting homes at auction, check out Zetabid.com. Right now they are running auctions in California, Florida and Illinois.

Trulia, Cyberhomes, Altos, RealtyTrac, ForeclosureRadar

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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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Got a map based real estate site? Vancouver-based lat49 lets you monetize that asset with its geo-targeted advertising network.

It’s pretty simple really, as a publisher you simply sign up to join their network, incorporate their API and then begin earning ad revenue passively. Think of it like Google Adsense for maps.

It raises the possibility for brokerages (many of whom have invested heavily in map-based real estate search tools) to develop an alternative source of revenue and offset some of those costs, by being able to bring advertising directly to their maps.

What would make this offering a real winner, would be the option to offer premium map-based ad space to ancillary service providers, vendors and even local merchants. The key aspect would be to be able to control who and what advertisements would appear on your site.

In addition, Lat49 also give real estate companies (even individual brokers or agents) a unique opportunity to create regionally-based branding campaigns across multiple web properties by embedding ads at a local or even hyperlocal level.

Lat49 gives advertiser several IAB approved sizes including a 728×90 Leaderboard, a 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and a 468×60 Full Banner ad.

Sites currently using this technology include Hotpads in the US and HomeZilla (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) in Canada.

lat49, real estate marketing, online advertising

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HouseValues (SOLD), the 10 year-old lead generation company, shed it’s skin this morning and repositioned itself as a marketing and technology solutions company.

The new company is going to be called Market Leader and brings together a number of HouseValues’ recent acquisitions, including RealtyGenerator web site and CRM tool, under a new roof. They also have a minority stake in ActiveRain (see ActiveRain secures $2.75 million from HouseValues).

Along with the rebranding, they also launched two new products; Growth Leader, aimed at helping real estate agents manage their online advertising spending and Team Leader, which will help agents manage their teams.

Market Leader will trade on the NASDAQ until the symbol LEDR and will be featured in the closing-bell ceremony on November 24.

More coverage:

• HouseValues rebrands as Market Leader

market leader, housevalues, real estate marketing

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Dash, the web enabled GPS unit is slashing 50 jobs and exiting the hardware business, according to GigaOM.

The futuristic unit pulled data from the ‘net and mashed it it up with turn-by-turn directions - a pretty slick idea, all things considered. In real estate they had deals going with content partners Coldwell Banker (see Dash GPS Get Real Estate Search) and Trulia (see Trulia Goes Mobile, Adds Feeds).

Mobile real estate search and location-based navigation technologies seem to me to be the perfect marriage. Personally, I’d love to be able to have the ability to output the results of a property search and then have the whole viewing tour guided via GPS.

I think the real problem in this case was not the concept, but the execution. Standalone units like the Dash are quickly being outpaced by smart devices like the iPhone and Blackberry Bold, which already incorporate GPS and do not require additional fees (beyond their monthly data plans).

And while applications on each of those platforms are not quite there yet to do a multi-stop property tour, they’re close (see iPhone real estate app showdown).

Dash seems to have recognized this, and by retooling their business for B2B, we may still see their technology show up in onboard navigation systems and other devices someday.

dash, mobile real estate, gps, real estate 2.0

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This week Redfin shuttered its hyperlocal Sweet Digs blogs in San Francisco, Boston, San Diego and Orange County.

Sweet Digs Seattle is still alive but it looks like it has turned into a more traditional brokerage blog; now just advertising Redfin’s new listings and open houses.

Sweet Digs was initially founded to replicate the formula pioneered by successful local blogs like Brownstoner and Curbed. Hire independent bloggers, blog about real estate in each market, create light yet compelling content, build a community and grow an affinity amongst consumers for the Redfin brand.

Presumably the expense of running the blogs was just too big for them to bear in this market. So they’re now retooling the blogs to focus on simply providing hard data for each of the markets they serve.

As a creative experiment in social media, it’s a shame to see them go.

[h/t 360Digest]

redfin, sweet digs, real estate 2.0

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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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Gentrify is a new site reminiscent of one of the grandaddies of real estate mashups; HousingMaps.com.

Only better. It scrapes San Francisco property listings from craigslist but adds a number of unique filters that will help you find the perfect pad.

And by ‘you’ I mean, yes ‘you’ - the yuppie (see Stuff White People Like).

Gentrify’s goal is to help you pick the perfect neighborhood you can move in to and gentrify. You can filter your searches by whether the homes take dogs and even figure out how close you are to your favorite gluten free restaurants, sushi bars, tea rooms and pilates clinics. Among many others.

Gentrify has dozens of filters you can layer on. I love it.

That’s not all. The individual listing pages rock too. They clearly designed and with a fantastic written description of the neighborhood - check out the ‘what will living here be like?’ section.

Seriously though - I think this is a great trend to watch and one I hope catches on elsewhere. I believe adding ‘Real World’ filters are going to be what helps differentiate your choices in sea of boring me-too search tools.

Also, adding context to a real estate search is going to be key (see Neighborhood Search Comes Back) moving forward in this market; especially as consumers adopt a more measured and drawn out buying decision.

Were a broker web site (especially with it’s IDX feeds for better listing coverage) to give me this many options, it’d be a winner in my books.

And it could be easy to get your hands on too. Gentrify was an entry in Rails Rumble 2008 and was coded by team 734m. Give ‘em a shout.

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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

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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