4realz.net

…great for a variety of reasons, don’t expect to use a corp blog to drive consumer traffic.

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…the folks I talked with at RE  Connect were pretty underwhelmed.

BHG Real Estate

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Today I was fortunate to interview a woman who has created a blog that has become a true resource for her community as part of a weekly podcast series I’m doing on Rain City Guide.    This woman spends hours and hours each day crafting posts about her community, everything from local events, new permits, “missing [...]

…I really like how they’ve mapped it out! 
The Realtor.com team recently turned on a “heat map” option within their home valuation tool.  Here’s a heat map of Ballard in Seattle where you can really see the detail of the more expensive areas (in particular the areas around the water!):

It’s clean, fast and well implemented.  [...]

NOTE:  You can listen to the podcast and read a brief summary of the show at the bottom of the post!
As I mentioned last week, I’m putting together a list of resources for agents for a presentation at RE Connect…  and at the end of the process, I’ll end up with a list of [...]

Long-time Rain City Guide contributor, Galen Ward, announced that Estately just got $450K in angel funding!  Congrats Galen!
The Estately team is used to operating on a shoe-string budget, so it will be interesting to see what they accomplishes with this money!

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DotHomes, Trulia, and RealEstate.com (and I’m sure others) have added Google’s Street Views to their home search tools.   Despite all the press releases flying around about this feature, the real innovation is on Google’s site since everyone is just tapping into their stuff and becoming ever more tied to the Google mapping solution.

addthis_url [...]

I think I’ve recovered enough now to actually post about it!
Despite our best efforts to be prepared, the day started off a bit rough with a nearby mudslide taking out power in our building in the morning (meaning no hot coffee and no projector) and a 9-car pileup on a nearby freeway [...]

As I said to when I started the 4realz interviews, I reached out to four players in the real estate technology space and asked them a similar set of 9 questions.   I purposefully picked four people representing four different companies at different stages of development and different types/levels of funding.   First was Marty [...]

After interviewing Marty last week, I thought it would be interesting to turn to Alex Chang (CEO of Roost) in order to get the perspective from someone entering the real estate search space from a different place in terms of timing, funding and resources…
I first met Alex while we he was setting up shop at [...]

…starts-ups that feature listings thanks to the non-compete clause with Move.
This begs the question: What benefit will the VC fund actually bring to its members if they can’t help them market their listings?
(On a side note, I REALLY want to thank everyone who has been sending me tips lately… It definitely makes checking my [...]

I’m somewhat of a night owl, so I thought I’d have no problem waiting out the U.S. launch of the UK site DotHomes. But it is getting pretty late and the U.S. version of the site still hasn’t gone live.
However, TechCrunchUK published their story (with the not so promising comment: “The question, [...]

…this blog post by Brendan.  While it doesn’t provide much info on the VendAsta “product” it does start to shed some light on what the crew is thinking beyond setting up lots of Dell computers!
If you want more, they are equally vague about their actually product, but always interesting, on this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8OhdTy5Gms]
Here are my notes [...]

…some of the people finding success in today’s real estate market (Part 1).

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Roost.com is a real estate start-up that just launched their real estate search site….
I had a chance to meet the Roost.com team at NAR in Vegas and was impressed with them… so I was downright excited when they offered to give me a preview of their site at RE Connect (see comment #1).
During my conversation [...]

… Or am I just having too much fun digging into the US Patent Office website for patent applications filed by Zillow employees? (Previous patent digs can be found on my post about Zillow’s auction patent…)
THE FIND: A team of Zillow employees applied for a patent on an “Interactive floorplan viewer” in Nov [...]

(some names left anonymous to protect the innocent)

There’s a hell of a lot of VC money floating around this industry. I was surprised at how many people there were with lots of VC funding. Joel seemed to notice the same thing: “a whole new crop of real [...]

Out of curiosity about a fellow panelist at the CB event, I did a google search on Jorritt Van der Muelen, it brought back a few blasts from the past… Anyone else remember when Rob McGarty (pre-Redfin days) was talking about Zillow’s application to patent an auction marketplace around real estate listings? [...]

Mike mentioned a while back that he is speaking at O’Reilly’s Money:Tech conference, but he didn’t toot his own horn to let us all know he hit Tim’s Radar a few days ago.
Altos Research is one of the few start-ups in the online real estate space that genuinely excites me.  It’s only a matter of [...]

Top 10 stories of 2007 from Inman News (see the article for details):

Subprime market implodes; housing downturn worsens.
Blogging runs deeper in real estate’s blood.
Foxtons closes shop.
Foreclosure problem worsens; Bush announces rescue plan.
Redfin and “60 Minutes” of fame.
Trulia and Zillow get booted from Prudential Real Estate convention.
Realogy goes private.

Well-known real estate writer dies.
NAR’s Gateway project announced.
FHA [...]