Home improvement is always a hot topic – and usually something that Realtors know a good deal about. As a Realtor, you know how important an upgraded kitchen or bath can be when listing a home, or how it pays to scrape the “popcorn” off your ceiling, or even the power of new lighting throughout the home to make it “light and bright.” When a home is picture perfect it makes it that much easier to sell, and to sell for the best price possible.

Fixr is a home improvement site that I was first introduced to on LinkedIn. Described by the press as an “ebay for contractors”, fixR is a Home Improvement, Renovations & Repair services marketplace.

How Fixr works:

1. Describe your project and post it 100% free
2. Get estimates from qualified pros in your area (love the local feature!)
3. Pick the best based on quality, reputation and price

Pretty cool concept! I really like this for a home owner but also for the agent.

In my past job, working in a residential real estate firm as their marketing manager, I can not tell you how many times I saw emails going out asking for qualified contractors for specific projects for clients. Although most agents have relationships with key local contractors, sometimes you are up against a tight deadline, or have a really uniqe project and aren’t sure who to turn to. I think this site could be a great solution.

In addition, One thing that really caught my eye for Realtors, was this infograph they posted: 2010 Home Buying Guide to Tax Credits. They created a really easy to understand graph and easily supplied the HTML code for you to copy and paste it into your Web site or blog. Is this helpful to you? Is this something you’d use?

Would love your feedback or comments – please post below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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1. Like it? Hate it? The iPad which drew a ton of rumors and speculation is ready to make it’s debut. The 1st commercial aired during the Academy Awards (which explains why Steve Jobs was on the red carpet) and is officially going mainstream. The iPad will be on sale on April 3, 2010 and pre-orders begin March 12, 2010.

Here’s the commercial in case you missed it:

2. Better than the iPhone?! The Google Nexus One phone – the phone that had a lot of buzz when it first came out, is a phone that critics are still wondering if it can compete with the iPhone and other touch-pad type smartphones. Google has never made it a secret that they plan to release it to multiple carriers – just WHEN is the question. This phone is rumored to be coming to Verizon on March 23, 2010.

3. Wonder if I could sneak into this? f8 – The Facebook Developer Conference is slated for April 21-22, 2010.

According to the Facebook blog,

“f8 has always been about empowering a community of developers to hack, to build and to delight users. We’re looking forward to continuing this tradition at our third f8 in San Francisco on April 21-22, 2010. Please save the date!”

BONUS: One more thing to add to your calendar this month. Planning on coming to Real Estate Connect SF (#icsf) – Early Bird Registration ends in 11 days! Sign up by 3/19/10 and save over $300!

Would love your comments – please leave feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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On the iPhone at least. Android and other smartphone platforms have had livestreaming video apps for a while now. But the tide has finally turned in the favor of iPhone users too – as Ustream has finally had its app approved for distribution in iTunes (app store link).

For me, this release culminates three of the biggest technological trends of 2009; Lifestreaming, Location, and Video.

First up – Lifestreaming. Twitter. Facebook. You’ve probably heard of these sites. It’s now easier than ever to instantly share events to a large distributed audience online – what you’re doing. By sharing information via these networks you are building connections and, by extension, reach.

Location. GPS is nearly omniprescent in most modern smartphones. Your devices now know in an instant where you are in the world. Apps like Google Latitude, Foursquare and my new fav – Gowalla, all exist because they know where you are. So too do augmented reality apps like Layar (see Layar Technology Now Available for iPhone). Location awareness is a true technological paradigm shift.

And finally video. I’ve been on this soapbox long enough. But the web is rapidly becoming about video and video content — witness Comcast’s bid to acquire NBC/Universal; a traditional “pipe” getting into the video content game. Or U2’s massive live concert on Youtube that generated over 10 million streams across 7 continents.

So what does all this mean? The Ustream app has magnificent repercussions for citizen journalism, family ties and yes, even real estate (think of working with a relo client remotely to show them properties, for example). The power to broadcast live, each of us from the palms of our hands, will certainly change the way some of us communicate.

Time to go fire up my phone.

You’ll be able to find me here. Live.

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The first of which is the new site now knows where you live. It uses your IP address to figure out where you are searching from and automatically offers up properties from that area. IP address detection itself isn’t particularly new, but I like that the team behind the site are thinking of ways that it can be used to help streamline the real estate search process for consumers. What I’d really love to see however, is for this idea to be taken even one step further by integrating the location awareness built in to the new Firefox browser (see New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser).

Most notable however is CB’s new Bluescape search. Here’s their description from the press release

…allows consumers to give a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’ to various images that are displayed – similar to how popular music sites learn users’ preferences based on how they rate different songs. After rating various photos, consumers can then submit a query and the BlueScape technology will identify homes that might be a fit. Developed to help consumers actively looking to purchase a home as well as those still in the “dreaming phase,” this visually driven approach to search is new to the real estate category.

The tool works exactly as described. You’re presented a series of seemingly random “lifestyle” and real estate related photos; photos of mountains, pools, different styles of homes etc. You give each photo a thumbs up or thumbs down rating and after a period of time you can ask Bluescape to return your results.

The process is actually kind of fun (although the music got a little annoying after a while). Presumably, the more photos you rate the more accurate your results are. But it would be nice if the site gave you some indication of how many images a user needs to rate before good results are returned. Personally I just kept clicking until I couldn’t take the music anymore.

The results Bluescape returned were definitely intriguing – and at a national level the results were fairly close to the images I’d flagged. When I filtered the results to my local area however, things got a little rougher. For some reason, Bluescape recommended I live in a strip mall. Hardly what I’d call my “dream” home.

I’m not sure this is a problem with the algorithm behind the suggestion engine or if it was just my taste in photos. Very well could be the latter.

In any case, despite a few little glitches like this (and the fact the site doesn’t play nice with Safari web browser), it’s great to see a brand like Coldwell Banker thinking creatively and outside the box when it comes to real estate search.

The goal for any real estate brokerage in the coming months is going to be how to differentiate your real estate search site from the sea of Google Maps and pushpin clones that exist out there. Finding your own unique take, or angle, on search while staying true to your brand will be the most challenging, and rewarding task ahead.

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Brian Boero at 1000Watt Consulting sums it up best.

Now, today, search engine land reports that Google has taken this one step further to include a unique page for every listing that includes photos, a map (including Street View) property details, directions, transit information and more. It’s a listing detail page, basically.

I wrote back in July that “the game’s about to get interesting” (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search). Today, with the launch of Place Pages for real estate, it just did.

It’s live right now in Australia. So we’ll wait and see when and if it gets announced State-side. But if I were Move or Trulia or any of the other property search portals worldwide, I’d be nervously crossing my fingers this stays in the southern hemisphere.

Read more about it at search engine land.

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But NeighborCity is taking it one step further. It’s also displaying all the active agents in those markets and suggesting them alongside any searches done on the site. Right now it has profiles built for over 45,000 agents.

The premise is pretty simple, really; say I’m searching for a $400K single family home in the 97219 ZIP of Portland, Oregon – in addition to all the property listings that meet my criteria, NeighborCity is also going to suggest the best agent for my business. In this example, it says it is Dave Hrabal of Windermere.

They’re calling the service AgentMatch and it uses a proprietary algorithm to rank agents based on their relevance to the user’s search criteria – based on variables like price range, property type, neighborhood and the agents’ past performance.

If they’re interested in seeing the home, the buyer can choose to contact any of the suggested agents and the agent can respond to the inquiry with additional details on their commission structure and/or their individual specialties. Consumers get to stay anonymous until they’ve chosen an agent to work with.

Agents can also claim their profiles to provide more information to prospective clients. Presumably, there is some sort of referral fee paid out for any clients that come through the site.

We’ve seen agent matching sites before (Incredible Agents and Homethinking spring to mind) but this is the first site that I’ve seen that marries agent discovery so close to the property search touchpoint. It’s rather like the recommended items on Amazon.com – and I kind of liked the experience.

While it’s bound to be controversial (as any kind of computer generated valuation generally is) – what I liked about AgentMatch was at least the promise of editorial neutrality. Unlike Trulia or Zillow’s pay-to-play advertising model, which as a consumer I’d typically disregard. In theory, the algorithm should surface the best agent for my needs.

What I would like to see however, is greater detail and transparency on how the AgentMatch suggestion is generated. Currently – there’s really no explanation provided as to why the agents that are presented are suggested. And that’s the biggest shame really.

No sense telling me the who without telling me the why.

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You can see a live demo here.

It’s a sharp looking design that really pushes Wordpress beyond its blogging basics. For just shy of a hundred bones (a pretty small investment really) you get a great looking web site with a lot of baked in functionality.

But more than just a good looking site — with a choice of four color schemes — you get the benefit of Wordpress’ fantastic SEO optimization, an integrated blog and all the great plugins and hacks available to Wordpress site owners.

I particularly liked the way Agentpress gives you customizable listing templates for individual properties which incorporate some nice design elements like the Lightbox-esque popups and embedded Google Maps. Plus, because each listing is stored as a separate post in the Wordpress database, Agentpress gives you a modest property search tool right off the home page to index your individual listings/posts.

Marry these property pages with a vanity URL and you’ve got yourself a pretty snazzy single-property website.

After a bit of a lull, there’s been a slew of real estate-related activity on Wordpress recently, starting with the Local Market Explorer plugin released by Zillow (see New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress).

Now, with premium theme options like Agentpress (the iReal Estate Theme is another premium theme available for purchase) and an embeddable IDX solutions like that from Diverse Solutions, you’ve got the makings of pretty kick-ass website – right off the shelf.

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The LME plugin, which was built by Jonathan Mabe and Andrew Mattie, developers with Diverse Solutions, automatically creates rich pages on your blog that incorporate data from Zillow, Education.com, Flickr, Walk Score and Yelp.

Zillow has set up some test pages here:

• Los Angeles
• San Diego
• Seattle

You can download the plugin immediately from WordPress plugin directory.

A couple of key notes; you’ll need separate API keys for each of the data sources but you can turn on or off which sources you want to incorporate. Also, the plugin does not let create hyperlocal pages (at either a neighborhood or ZIP code level) so you must keep all of your pages at the city level, for now.

Zillow promises future versions that will address these issues. But regardless, this is an instant, dead simple way to instantly create compelling content that your web visitors are looking for. Organized correctly, you could create a powerfully relevant local resource.

wordpress, zillow, local market explorer, plugin

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So while visiting the new site it also gave me a chance to have another look at BHG’s search tool, which I hadn’t played with for a while.

I can definitely say that it has one of the nicest user interfaces of any major real estate brand web site and rivals (even exceeds) many of the third party search sites. I have to agree with Greg at Vendor Alley who writes “[it is] simply gorgeous, and very intuitive.”

It has some really nice subtle touches – like filtering by the age of the home. And I loved how the search results are grouped in to price brackets. Also geeks like me are going to love you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results.

It all shows me that they really spent some time thinking through how a real estate consumer will perform a search and how they want to get the data returned.

Problem is, as gorgeous as the site is… it doesn’t seem to work.

Just like Greg – I was surprised how few listings it returned in my neighborhood (zip code 97219). Only 29 listings on BHG versus 460 on Realtor.com and 466 on a local broker’s website.

Weird.

Another beef is that it seems totally borked in Safari 4.0.

I could not get the site to do any kind of search on my Mac. Clicking around on the buttons or drop-downs did absolutely nothing. This forced me to fire up my backup browser Firefox, which also gave me some weird display errors in FF 3.5.

Granted these are both very new versions of each browser, so it’s not surprising to find these kind of hiccups.

I hope these two errors are simply launch day bumps. I know how hard it is to come out of the gates with something that works with every machine, in every instance – it can be a truly Herculean task.

But I hope these kinks get ironed out quickly. It’d be a shame to spoil such a great experience with small little bugs like these.

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything coming out of the Googleplex around its moves in the real estate space.

And now, we wait no longer. On the Google LatLong blog today, Google announced that they have rolled out vast improvements in the way that they display real estate searches in their index; they are now included by default in the Maps view.

They have also rolled out brand new real estate specific landing page at maps.google.com/realestate.

We want to keep making it easier for people find the real estate information they’re looking for and have it returned to them in a useful way. So, from today, if you enter a query like san francisco real estate on Google Maps, you’ll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify “real estate” from the search options menu, but now we’re making it easier to find available listings.

This move should come as no surprise to anyone following this space. Real estate search tools like Zillow and Trulia are seeing significant traffic growth and Google will only stay on the sidelines so long once they see someone else starting to monetize search results.

They also seem to have borrowed some of the features (transit search) that made some of their competitors, like Estately, so compelling.

You’ll notice that we’ve made some other enhancements that will improve your real estate searching experience. We’ve added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.

This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a BART stop. You can also pan the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is more your speed.

Google has silently been collecting broker feeds for the last couple of years (pulling them in to their Google Base database). And so like many of its counterparts it has a reasonably deep market coverage, but it does depend on what part of the country you’re searching.

As mentioned up front, right now Google is only deploying these searches into its Maps results, so they are relatively confined. But I wonder how long before they display them in their Web results too (much like they do with their Local Business results – at the top of the organic results). If that’s the case, here’s where we may see the Mountain View giant start to siphon off traffic from the real estate specific search sites.

Time will tell, but the game’s about to get interesting.

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