The US based realty search engines (Trulia, and to a lesser degree, Redfin) are quickly getting lapped by their European counterparts.

Seems like coming out of the gates, nearly all of the Brits aped Trulia’s ground breaking search interface – but have quickly pushed that aside as they race to add new features (see Extate Launches Video Tours). Now it’s Trulia’s interface that is starting to look at bit dated.

extate, who are competing against the likes of Nestoria, Zoomf (see Zoomf Aims to Help British Home Buyers) and OnOneMap (see OnOneMap Gives You More), faces the cutthroat reality that in a field crowded with competition, they must innovate or die.

That same lack of competition here may mean the reigning kings of the Real Estate 2.0 search game grow complacent (as was the case with Realtor.com before them) – but also means there’s a huge opportunity for new players to come into the game.

A couple of new features extate has developed recently; that US based real estate search engines should perhaps take note of…

• No more balloon popups. Means the map doesn’t readjust when you select the markers – which I love. Maps jumping all over the place when I’m trying to click on a property. The property information displays the full details in the sidebar which is also nice.
• Markers change color once you’ve viewed them – a simple yet extremely useful innovation which answers one of the most basic questions a real estate shopper might have; “What freakin’ properties have I already seen here?”

More excitingly, The Heat is On. As I’ve said before, “any data set can be made visually sexier with a heatmap” (Heat Maps Catch on Fire) and Trulia does a nice job of layering heat maps onto city level search as a way to see market activity (e.g. Portland Home Prices and Heat Map).

But extate has taken it one step further and added a fourth tab to the Google map that along with Satellite and Hybrid imagery provide heat maps of local prices per square foot (their implementation recalls the visually stunning GeoIQ mashups). This is a great feature that coupled with more specific local information, could be adopted by many of the big brokers too (see Big Brokers Going Local).

All of these advances however, mean very little without a clear monetization strategy – which is one area that Trulia (and again, to a lesser degree, Redfin) have focused much more of their energies to date. That said, it’d be nice to see some of this innovation trickle over to this side of the pond one of these days.

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With definitely one of the sillier names going in real estate (with the exception only perhaps of eMongoo), UK property search engine Zoomf plans a Q1 launch. Zoomf will be going head to head with existing real estate search sites like Nestoria and, to a lesser degree, extate.com.

Zoomf (is it ‘Zoom F’ or ‘Zoomph’?) may look familiar to readers this side of the pond, its search results pages look awfully similar to Trulia’s. I guess imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.

In addition to a mashup of current properties for sale or for rent (let), Zoomf offers pricing guides for many of the neighborhoods (sorry, neighbourhoods) in and around London. Unfortunately, their search tools don’t work outside of the London area, at least for now.

Personally, I’m glad to see the Real Estate 2.0 space taking off in other parts of the world too. I lived in the UK a couple of years ago, and harbor fantasies about returning there some day with my family (I hold UK citizenship, in addition to Canadian and American) – so these sites are of particular interest to me.

For more on what’s happening in the UK, check out Mike Price’s Interview with Nestoria. Also, Renthusiast – a British real estate blog that I found quite informative (and blogrolled).

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