Like it or not, Cyberhomes just really hasn’t caught on like some of it other contemporaries. Technically it’s a very competent site and one that I’ve always thought was definitely under-recognized. But even I’m guilty myself of forgetting it’s out there somedays.

Part of the problem may be the disjointed approach it has taken to its product over the years – CH has had more homepage redesigns than any other site I know – but it may also just be that it has never really found a good niche to corner. Property valuations, Zillow’s got them licked. Likewise Trulia with search experience, Realtor.com with depth of listings. And Frontdoor’s got them beat editorially.

To date, I hate to say it, there never really was a good reason to go to Cyberhomes.

But they launched a new service last week that might just turn that around.

Called the Market Forecast, Cyberhomes now promises to help you understand where your local market is heading. The report uses Cyberhomes’ unique access to its parent Fidelity’s data on over 40 million loans, and layers on top of that all of its property records and other data sources.

So for only $3.99 you can order a 12-month real estate market forecast and housing supply projection, one that includes “delinquency and foreclosure trends, a 12-month value projection and summary information about the subject property”.

Brilliant.

I think this could just be the tipping point for a turn around in Cyberhomes’ fortunes. Forget about the past and look to the future (literally). Especially if they can focus 100% of its marketing efforts towards branding the site as THE destination to go and get the answers to the two most burning questions today; should I sell or should I buy?

There’s their niche.

This could be a winner in my books. Best part is – there is a real revenue model behind this too. Shocking I know. But premium reports can be a real money maker.

Nevertheless, I suspect Cyberhomes has a very short window to execute on this. The other players can reproduce much of what they’ve done and will certainly do so if Cyberhomes starts selling lots of these reports.

So come on Cyberhomes, there’s no time like the present to change the future.

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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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Google Insights for Search is a fantastic new tool that allows you to dig into Google’s search volume patterns to find trends.

While I think there are a lot of ways you can use this tool (see agentgenius.com), I think that for most marketers the geographic breakdowns will be one of the most interesting – mainly because it can help identify brand awareness in any particular location.

Let’s look at the national brand awareness of the big search portals:

Strong Nationwide (Near universal brand awareness)

Realtor.com

Yahoo! Real Estate

Regionally Strong (Strong in specific regions; east, west, south, north)

Zillow.com

Trulia.com

Confined Awareness (Searches confined to single States)

Cyberhomes

Frontdoor.com

Poor roost.com did not have enough search volume to show any results.

(h/t Sellsius blog)

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When Trulia launched its new ad network (see Trulia Launches First Online Real Estate Ad Network) it was an attempt to leverage their network of advertisers while providing a way for third party publishers to showcase their advertising inventory to larger brand advertisers.

It’s a proven business model that works well across the Net, as evidenced by the success of networks like Glam Media and Federated Media and niche networks like the Deck.

And to give credit where credit is due, it’s also a concept in the real estate space that blogger (and occasional FOREM contributor) Erik Hersman first brought up in his post on Realty Thoughts over a year ago (see The Need for a Real Estate Specific Ad Network).

(BTW – Erik walks the walk too and just built a fantastic ad network for the automotive vertical for Piston Media Group.)

So while Trulia’s network may have been the first, surely it wouldn’t be the last…

Yup, sho nuff.

Competitor Cyberhomes just announced they’ve partnered with ad-network provider Adify to launch a competing ad platform that they are calling their Real Estate Vertical Advertising Network.

How many ad networks is too many? At the recent EconAds seminar the question was asked “Is it a good time to start an Ad Network?” The answer:

Now’s as good a time as any to start an ad network business, several panelists said. It’s like starting an Italian restaurant in New York. The good ones will thrive.

So whose business will last? Trulia or Cyberhomes? I suppose it depends on the depth of the advertising relationships both sites maintain and to what degree they are successful in getting publishers to sign up.

There’s no question there is a glut of unsold advertising inventory available these days with so many ad-supported web sites having been launched over the last couple of years. We’re also seeing dollars being shifted into web based advertising like never before So the one that’s able to marry those two needs might very well have a great business on their hands.

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Eppraisal.com pushed out a major new release of its site today which you can read more about on Realty Thoughts – eppraisal’s corporate blog.

Eppraisal prides itself in having the largest database of homes in the US with over 120 million property records (compared to Zillow’s stated 70 Million and Cyberhomes’ 100 Million). I have no idea if these figures are accurate, but at the end of the day, it’s not really a question of size but rather, whose database is more accurate…

This new release adds several new features to the site. Taking a cue from Terabitz – eppraisal’s home page can now be localized to display information from a particular zip code. Unlike Terabitz however, eppraisal does not let you choose which information you’d like to display or give you the ability to change the display order. Nor does it let you share that with others.

Entering your home in the search field, pulls up eppraisal’s familiar map interface with a selection of comps (pulled from public records, no MLS integration) displayed below it.

For your home’s valuation, eppraisal has chosen to return a value range, rather than an exact dollar figure like Zillow or Cyberhomes. While probably a safer route to go, it somehow feels less fulfilling.

To run a quick comparison, I took eppraisal’s middle number as being the closest estimate to my home’s value and then compared it to Zillow and Cyberhomes estimates – and it was nice to see that all three fell roughly in line with each other.

Whether any of them is a fair estimate of my house’s worth is probably best left up to an expert, but at least it gives me a rough baseline to work from.

The biggest addition to the new eppraisal.com seems to be addition of lots (and lots) of dynamic charts. The charts seem to graph just about every data-point eppraisal could find.

And while they certainly are pretty (the animation is slick) I struggled to find the relevance of some of the data being presented to me. No averages for example, or comparison to the subject property. Eppraisal just pushes out the raw data in graph form – and I still have to do all the manual calculations if I want really to get anything out of them.

One graph that I did really like however, was the current market index (under the Market Insight tab), which they chart back 12 months. Very handy if you want to get a general sense of the direction of the market in your town.

Another new addition to eppraisal is the Lifestyle tab, which pulls up a demographic profile of your zip code. They display profiles (definitions are from the market research firm Claritas) to give you a sense of who lives in your neighborhood (just in case you didn’t know). Unfortunately, they chose not to reveal the actual breakdown of the different segments, rather choosing instead to highlight the top five profiles in no particular order. My neighborhood broke down this way:

• Executive Suites
• Movers & Shakers
• Upper Crust
• New Beginnings
• Young Influentials

It actually seemed pretty accurate if I were to compare it to the people I know on my block.

But this tab and the Employment tab seem a little superfluous to me. The information, while mildly interesting, is not necessarily critical to any decision I might be making. Do I really care that there weren’t a lot of museum technicians in my neighborhood, for example?

When eppraisal really sings though is with it’s speed. As I played around with the site, I remarked (to no one in particular) that it felt much faster than the others I’d been using. My informal and unscientific testing bore out this hunch – I tested my house (i.e. typing in the same address) three times and timed how long it took to return a full page of results. I averaged the three scores to come up with the following results. YMMV.

Bottom line. Eppraisal was faster than Zillow and Cyberhomes is dog slow.

This is a pretty solid release for eppraisal. Its speed makes it a decent alternative to Zillow and Cyberhomes – especially if you’re just looking for quick valuation data on a property. However its research tools still feel a little lightweight, so if you’re looking for something with greater depth, I’d recommend sticking with one of the other two.

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AOL Real Estate just did a soft launch of its real estate portal – the site, still in BETA, has been significantly redesigned and now incorporates map-based search using maps from Mapquest, home valuation tools from Cyberhomes (see Cyberhomes Sneaks Into the Big Time) and mortgage data from Bankrate.com.

Listing data is sadly lacking right now and was, in my searches anyway, mostly confined to FSBO, some foreclosures and a few homes from Keller Williams. That’ll likely change once they begin to integrate listing content from Cyberhomes however.

The site design itself is a huge improvement and functionally, once they work out some of these kinks, I think it’ll be a big win for them.

But what this really signals to me is that old media is waking up to real estate online.

This is only the beginning in the evolution at established media properties that will begin to incorporate more of a search tools pioneered by the Real Estate 2.0 crowd. Yahoo! Real Estate was among the first to do this, but I suspect that many of the major media companies (McClatchy, Tribune) and even local newspapers are beginning to eye this strategy too as they see more and more real estate ad dollars start to flee their print publications for the Internet.

What does it mean in the long run for some of the Real Estate 2.0 first-movers like Zillow and Trulia? Well, first off – I’ll concede it somewhat validates their businesses model. That is, trying to sell advertising around real estate data. I’m still not convinced for these sites, advertising alone can sustain the investments they’re making, especially in today’s market (see What the Subprime Mess Means for Real Estate 2.0).

More than what’s happening in the market today however, as real estate search and valuation tools become more and more commodified on media properties, more and more advertising inventory will be available to potential advertisers – so CPM rates are bound to drop. This will put even further downward pressure on their margins. Destinations like Zillow are also going to start to have to compete for ad buys with sites that have much, much greater traffic than them.

The result in this is that, as the old media players begin to wake up and react to this new reality, it’s ultimately going to put a squeeze on Real Estate 2.0’s go-it-alone, destination-based model. AOL can leverage enormous amounts of cross-platform traffic to their site and so too could the newspaper publishers, for that matter, largely because of their significant offline brand presences. Trulia and Zillow, on the other hand, still face mountains to climb in terms of widespread consumer awareness.

Of the two, Trulia is probably better positioned in the long run, as it has already begun leveraging its technology to white-label search tools for other media properties like CNN/Money (see Tipping Point for Trulia?) as well as powering REBNY’s new ResidentialNYC site. Software sales is not nearly as sexy as developing a standalone destination – but ultimately may have more staying power in the long run.

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Inman News Blog has the news that Fidelity’s Cyberhomes has signed a deal with AOL Real Estate to power all of its home valuations. This is a big win for Cyberhomes, which has been steadily and stealthily rolling out new features and signing up brokers to get access to their listing feeds (most recently with Prudential CA/NV/Texas).

Cyberhomes may just end up the ‘dark horse’ winner in the Real Estate 2.0 arms race that is erupting between Trulia and Zillow.

Trulia’s betting its search interface will win out and that their listings will be the ultimate draw for buyers. While the site definitely is easy to use, it suffers from some glaring holes in its inventory and its strategy of handing traffic off to its broker partners may ultimately be its weakest link.

Especially as brokers develop better search tools on their own sites, and do a better job of converting and capturing some of those consumers that Trulia sends them. I know in my own home search I started on Trulia and then stayed on a local broker’s site because I found more listings there.

Zillow, on the other hand, is gambling that Web 2.0 social features will be the ultimate traffic drivers to their site. Unfortunately, I’ve seen little evidence that there’s much demand for this type of activity (see Zillow Flounders A Bit With New Release). I could be proven wrong on this one, but I have a hunch that the “real estate thrill” might be gone.

Zillow might be the most “fun” but it’s still chasing the average consumer, which is a very fickle market indeed.

Cyberhomes, meanwhile, seems to be splitting the middle and focusing on building out a very compelling and rich feature set. The site offers a deep source of data for anyone considering a home purchase. Thankfully it looks like they have resolved their browser compatibility issues too (see Cyberhomes AVM is a Total Joke)!

Cyberhomes seem to be focusing on the serious buyer and real estate investor. And in a down or turning market — when the average consumer is sick about hearing about falling home prices — that might just be the sweet spot.

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