vFlyer, the classified listings service, unveiled a new widget service to its members today that allow you to take your v-Flyer-hosted listings with you anywhere, including your blog.

Previous vFlyer coverage:

• vFlyer Posts Your Listings For You
• vFlyer Retools For Real Estate

vFlyer’s widget editor lets you customize either horizontal or vertical galleries, or if you have lots of listings you can create a scrolling display of images. You can choose to create either Flash or JavaScript widgets and vFlyer churns out the necessary HTML code to let you post it on your own website, a blog, social networks or online marketplaces like eBay.

Basic customizations like background color and link colors so you can better blend your widget in with the rest of your site. See the following example:

vFlyer is interesting as it’s morphing from being strictly a online classifieds platform into a single property web site provider (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?) and now to a full listings management package.

However, unlike total web site solutions like Ubertor, Top Producer and Point 2 Agent – vFlyer provides agents with a custom online marketing platform and inventory management system. You then have the ability to pipe that data into whatever environment you choose. That could be a Wordpress blog or even your existing web site.

What I really like about this idea because it allows you to be much more flexible in your hosting options and doesn’t tie to you to one exclusive provider for all your web business needs. This isn’t for everyone; but for more tech savvy Realtors, this “offsite” approach could give you the ability to pull together many disparate elements (blogs, forums, etc.) and other real estate widgets (see Real Estate Widgets for your Website) and create the ultimate real estate portal.

vFlyer currently lets you post up to 10 active flyers for free. Premium plan start at $19.95/month after that.

More coverage:

• VentureBeat » Vflyer releases classified ad widget

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Craigslist is the undisputed king in the online classifieds market. Its marketplace has a depth and scope that very few other sites can even come close to matching. As amazing as the site is however, there are a few little roadblocks that the site throws up in front of you if you really want to get the most out of your searches there. Luckily – these are easily overcome using a couple of other free tools.

One of my minor annoyances with craigslist is when you want to move beyond a simple query in a single city. Unfortunately – the way craigslist is designed, it requires you navigate to a whole new site every time you want to see a new city’s postings.

Thankfully, craigslist provides feeds of each of its search results pages. So if you are trying to keep an eye on real estate listings from a number of different cities or counties for example, by using a customizable RSS aggregator like FeedRaider – you can put all of those feeds on a single page.

Check out this sample page I made for real estate listings in Oregon.

Using this method you can stay on top of the newest postings from each of the areas you’ve identified.You could do this in separate markets, showing different prices ranges, different types of housing – the options are virtually limitless.

While not especially hard to navigate – the one thing Craigslist definitely is not, is pretty to look at. Thankfully, there are a number of other sites out there that can help relieve grey and blue tedium of Craigslist’s pages.

Transparent Real Estate blog recently reminded me of one my favorites that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. Listpic is a site that let’s you navigate through craiglist’s postings using the thumbnail images associated with each listing. Clicking on any of the thumbnails displays the full text of the details as well as any additional photos. Very cool.

Though the images are small, I find scanning through them is much easier than lines of text. Plus, since I rarely bother exploring any listings that don’t include pictures, this site acts as a sort of filter for me right off the bat.

So whether it’s for real estate or other needs, these two tools can really help you managing the results of your craigslist searches. Used individually or in conjunction with each other, they definitely are two easy steps you can take to take your craigslist experience to a whole new level.

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vFlyer is a new startup that aims to help you create a virtual flyer and post it to online classifieds sites like Google Base, Oodle and Craigslist, as well as to a number of other paid sites too. It’s very similar to the service Postlets.com already provides, but adds a number of unique features.

Like Postlets, vFlyer allows you to use a number of very nice templates to display items for sale or listed properties. (e.g., Beautiful Pacific Heights Flat for Vacation Rental). Creating a vFlyer is very simple, just a matter of filling in a number of fields with the appropriate information. The whole process takes little time and is very straightforward. Using vFlyer, anyone can easily have a professional looking listing ad in minutes.

Hitting the publish button automatically creates a unique URL for your listing and sends it out to all of vFlyers partner sites, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to be more selective about which sites you can send it to. Right now, it seems to be an all-or-nothing approach. vFlyer does give you some bookmarklets and the raw HTML code that will allow you to post your listing to other sites (eBay, craigslist) – but overall this solution seems a little kludgey to me.

Once you’ve published your listing however, vFlyer has a number of advanced feautres you can use, including sending your listing to more people via email or downloading it as a HTML or PDF document (which you could then use in your flyer boxes). On the backend, once your vFlyers are live, their statistics tab gives you traffic statistics on all your published listings for analysis. This is all pretty slick.

One very cool thing is that vFlyer is partnering with RapLeaf, an online reputation service which I wrote about earlier, so that Realtors can market and benefit from their online reputations.

vFlyer is currently in Beta, so creating a flyer and using the service is currently free. No word on whether they plan on charging for the service in the future.

Read more about vFlyer here: Wanted: A Way to Profit by Simplifying Web Classifieds – New York Times

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Zillow is not the only one launching a redesign this week. The Google Base homepage has been redesigned as well. The new page makes it easier to bulk upload listings and also adds the option of using the Google Base API.

The classifieds site can still be found at base.google.com.

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