Tune out if you’ve had enough of all the Facebook talk.

Following on the previous posts about Frontdoor’s implementation of Facebook Connect, Hotpads has rolled out a revamped homepage that also features Facebook integration prominently.

As with Frontdoor, you can now login to HotPads using only your Facebook account. The nice thing is Hotpads lets you dive right into into using all of its tools using only your FB credentials.

The upside?

Among other things, you can save favorites to your account, and share them with your friends by sending listings to your friends and/or posting them on your wall.

All fairly standard stuff but what I think this leads us to is a greater recognition and emphasis on the need for collaborative search online. To tap into the social web for recommendations and reassurance when it comes to finding a home.

This is largely an activity that to date has largely only happened offline. Collaborating with a spouse or partner in a house hunt is certainly nothing new, as is passing around a listing sheet or property flyer to friends and family. But you now have a whole breed of web-based applications (Dwellicious also springs to mind) that are helping better enable this activity online.

Using Facebook Connect to grease the wheels of this kind of online collaboration is a smart move for Frontdoor and Hotpads as it’ll presumably (hopefully) get more people using their product. As I mentioned before, it lowers one of the points of friction that exists to prevent people from making the best use of any kind of search experience; an agent or broker’s IDX site, an MLS site, a search portal, whatever.

Signing up for yet another service is tedious. And like it or not, most of us these days have Facebook account. And a lot of us like to talk about real estate.

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Congrats to Trulia for winning the 2009 Webby award in the real estate category. This is nice recognition for the Bay-Area company, but they still have a ways to go to catch up its nearest competitors.

Traffic to all the major portals seems to be ticking up after a pretty miserable 4th Quarter all around. Trulia sits third, while Zillow looks to taking a remarkable run at knocking Realtor.com off the top spot.

Congrats also to the folks at Hotpads who won the People’s Choice Webby this year.

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All this talk about the economy got you down?

Why not head to the Coast?

Don’t know about you – but I could sure use a vacation these days. Hotpads, another search portal we haven’t heard much from lately (see Roost Changes Up Their Game), now can help.

They’ve just launched a new feature on their site that adds vacation properties to their site. The company claims this is the first map-based vacation home search tool.

The service is definitely useful and has around 20,000 available properties in the US. You can even book a stay at many of the homes you’ve found directly through the site.

A couple of things I found missing however; there’s no way for current owners to add their properties to the database and there doesn’t seem to be a way to sort the properties by user ratings (i.e. those properties getting the most ‘favorites’).

Plus Hotpads still has its goofy icons which tend to consume far too much virtual real estate for my liking.

I did like the integration of Street View however (though it seemed pretty buggy and didn’t always work). I expect this to be a really nice tool to have when researching a destination home to rent for a getaway. When you’re dropping a couple grand, it’d be nice to see what’s next door and across the street.

See you in the surf!

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Trulia lets you search ‘em.

Zillow lets you talk about ‘em. (Love the contextual advertising!)

Now Hotpads lets you map ‘em. Very cool (and scary, depending on where you live) feature on Hotpads lets you map, county-by-county, the number of foreclosures near you.

Just click on Heat Maps and then choose Foreclosures by Capita. High number areas are colored Red, cooler areas are colored light blue.

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We haven’t heard much from Hotpads recently over the last year, but thankfully all is not lost for the property search engine. They just launched a new feature on their site that introduces a new search variable to the mix – the rent vs. buy decision. From their press release:

In the down real estate market more housing shoppers are wrestling with the Buy vs. Rent decision. Now HotPads users can see immediately what they can afford in both scenarios and are given the tools necessary to make a sound financial decision.

So – how it works.

When users click the Buy vs. Rent tab above the map, both For Sale and For Rent listings are returned in the search results on the map. For Sale listings have a monthly cost associated with them that take mortgage payments including interest rate, down payment, and term length into account. As users adjust their pricing criteria on the map, homes for sale and rent appear and disappear respectively. This allows users to see exactly what properties they can afford to buy and rent.

It’s definitely an interesting approach. And I’m definitely all for introducing new ways to search for property online.

Being able to adjust a slider to see properties based on the question “How much a month would this cost me?” is a novel idea and it definitely fits with the way most consumers approach a buying decision these days. Heck, it’s certainly the first question I always ask myself when I am looking at new homes.

Of course, there are all kinds of additional factors that go into the monthly cost that this tool ignores (it’s really just a simple mortgage calculator), but as another starting point it is a very interesting way to search for homes. I found myself having a lot of fun weighing one property versus another based on their monthly costs.

Unfortunately, while the concept is intriguing, 4Realz calls Hotpads’ implemention of the feature a bit baffling – and I tend to agree. It took me a few minutes to figure out how it was supposed to work. I also think to call the search ‘Buy vs. Rent’ is a little confusing – ‘Monthly Cost’ might have made it a little bit more clear.

The best part of this however, is that I don’t think any of the search sites; Trulia, Zillow, Move.com, Redfin, have totally nailed the search experience yet. It’s great to see some new innovation in the space and companies continuing to challenge the status quo a little bit.

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HotPads.com, the apartment and rental home search engine and one of the founding members of Real Estate 2.0, had been awfully quiet lately. (For more, read Renters Arm Themselves With Info)

This week however they burst back on the scene with a brand new features, new maps , new imagery and more importantly – $2.3 million dollars in VC financing.

On the surface, the site has not changed all that much and the interface is still a little too cartoony for my tastes. The icons, while visually interesting (they bounce!), consume way too much screen real estate on a map search and make the search experience a little clumsy in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s a full list of the new features from their press release:

• New HotPads Maps
• Microsoft Satellite Mapping Integration
• Neighborhood and City Demographic and Housing Stats with Wikipedia
• Articles
• Political Party Affiliation Mapping
• Demographic and Housing Heat Maps
• Points of Interest Mapping including Schools, Universities and Public
• Transportation

What is most interesting to me out of this list are the heat maps, which you can now layer over a search and show datasets like population density, per capita income and median rent. Clicking on any of these adds Neighboroo-like color coding of the data to any map view.

Drilling down to a particular apartment takes you to an expanded property view which gives you a couple of slick features; a dynamic slide show of photos (should any exist) and the ability to tag the listing to del.icio.us and even share it on Facebook – a feature I’m think more of the real estate search engines should adopt. (Unfortunately the Facebook feature did not work for me exactly as I had hoped – it posted a generic Hotpads promo to my profile rather than details on the rental itself.)

Onto the bigger picture however, and what this announcement signals to me is that Spring not only means a new home buying season, but a renewed push for new financing by the Real Estate 2.0 front runners. They’ve all now seen a couple of full business cycles and are probably sucking on the fumes of their angel rounds.

They’re also heading into tougher market environment these days and probably need to top up their bank accounts; so Redfin is out beating on doors and Trulia may be next. Pretty much the only guy smiling is Zillow who is still sitting pretty on top of a mountain of cash.

More on HotPads new deal from Screenwerk.

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A couple of rental-related sites to check out today.

Rentometer is a fun site. If you’re a renter, punch in your address and how much you’re currently paying and the site cranks out a GMaps mashup of rentals in your neighborhood – plus a fancy animated barometer of where you stand in comparison to what your neighbors’ are paying.

I imagine this site could work well for prospective landlords trying to gauge the local market as well. You can even check out the Top 10 Highest Rental Rates by city or Zip. I really like the simplicity of this site – the design is very well executed. By the folks at iiproperty.com.

Hotpads.com has been around for a while, but today they’ve released a new version of their site that allows you to conduct deeper searches based on variables like income distribution, age distribution. One big plus, their new site should make it even easier for out-of-towners to start researching where they want to live. Seeing as I just moved to a new city fairly recently, this kind of feature definitely appeals to me.

Marry these two tools together and you have a pretty powerful 1-2 combination for would-be or existing renters trying to scope out the best deals out there.

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