I’ve had a few days to play around with Realtor.com’s new Neighborhood tool and I like a lot of what I see so far. But I’ll get the obvious criticisms out of the way first; it really, really doesn’t play very well yet with Firefox in OSX (or at all in Safari) – there are quite a few formatting errors – and, it’s not live in Portland yet. Both of these I’ll forgive (for now) given its Alpha status.

Somewhat reluctantly then, I confined my research to this post to Seattle Neighborhoods as it is the city I am most familiar with, after Portland.

Starting on the homepage, clicking on a the map reveals basic information of the neighborhood you’re looking at (this was flaky in Firefox) in a pop-up dialog. Basic info is presented and the outlines of the neighborhoods are mapped down to the street level. If your own neighborhood is missing, you can even draw it in yourself using the site’s WikiHoods feature.

In order to begin to research a new neighborhood, the site gives you a number of sliders to adjust to your preferences.

And while the sliders were a neat way to refine a search – moving them along their axis line automatically refreshed the neighborhood list above it – nothing happened on the map however. It would have been nice if the appropriate neighborhood outlines were displayed. This very well could have been a bug or browser issue though.

While neat, I left feeling that perhaps the data points the sliders were asking me to refine were just a bit too nebulous. Family friendly? Hip Factor? Where exactly do these ratings come from and what do they mean? Moreover, can my desires for either even be accurately conveyed through a slider?

Overall, I’m also not sure Realtor.com has totally nailed the top level of this site and ultimately, figured out who will be using it. Is for out-of-town or cross-town relocations? People already in a neighborhood?

If it’s the former, it seems to me there’s a little more hand-holding necessary at the top level before you can dive down in to the neighborhood level – right now the site presumes too much local knowledge on the neighborhoods themselves. And sliders don’t cut it for honing in my search. If I’m thinking of moving, I need to figure out where is best for me to go. Right now, it’s not entirely clear how I’m supposed to get there.

Heat maps might help me figure out what areas are hot or not. Maybe a quick demographic survey to better identify who I am and what kind of needs I have. Neighborhoodmatch.com did this very well (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) – I say ‘did’ because the site seems to be dead now.

Diving down into the neighborhoods – the site gets much better though. It kicks off with a summary description from Wikipedia and a photo feed from Flickr, as well a “Giga-Pixel” HD image. I did really like the Weather tab however – with its information on pollution levels and natural disasters – what fun!

Frankly though, most of this I’d lump into the ‘nice-to-know’ category and sling it all down at the bottom of the page. The HD photo especially is gimmicky and not terribly useful – though I did manage to peer into this person’s apartment using it.

The Learn section is much more valuable – there’s some really great data here including listings, housing data and school and crime info. All are nicely presented and you really could spend hours cruising through all of it.

The Maps are also another nice touch – you can really get a good sense of what’s happening in the area. This is what really is needed at the top level – it’s too bad you have to dig down into the individual neighborhoods before you can find all the good stuff.

One thing I did find of kind of eerie and that was an overall sense of deja vu; and maybe it was just because I was looking at properties in Washington State, but the more I played with Neighborhoods the more it began to remind me of Estately.com – though Estately somehow manages to make all of the information fit together much more elegantly.

That said, Realtor.com’s Neighborhoods is actually a great site that’s really just struggling to find its legs in Alpha right now. Underneath it has some very rich data and some good functionality. Give it a little time to mature and work out some of the kinks and I think it could become a very popular tool.

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Owning the conversation around real estate seems to be a big trend these days. Zillow’s trying to do it with their new release (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?) and now there’s another competitor on the block, so to speak.

YourStreet.com went live this morning. It’s a site for real estate geeks (of whom I proudly count myself one) to get together and talk about what’s happening in their city. The site covers Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle right now and soon will be adding Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego into the mix. They hope to be covering the top 50 metro areas in the country by the end of the year. (Hopefully Portland gets in there).

The site was started by a group of CNET veterans and was demo’d at the SFBeta mixer last month; Rafe Needleman mentioned it briefly in his recent post Start-ups in the city. YourStreet uses a bunch of ’social’ features to try and aggregate the local neighborhood knowledge of local residents. Local news articles, forums, blog posts and neighborhood wikis all add to the conversation. Flickr photo feeds from each city liven up the page as well.

Much like mycurrency.com (see My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds) is trying to do, YourStreet.com is also hoping to tap into the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to track neighborhood real estate markets. The idea is the people on the ground have an intuitive sense of what’s happening in their neighborhood, so users vote on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether it’s a hot or cool market. The votes are tallied and presented in a color coded graph. Votes are tied to a user’s profile and people can choose to agree or disagree with that opinion, which effectively polices the ratings – I suspect that the more people disagree with a particular ranking, that vote would drop out of the calculation.

I think this is probably the most compelling aspect of YourStreet. It allows anyone to quickly add their voice to the mix in a really fast and easy way. I bet this becomes one of the most popular features on the site. How accurate the Market Monitors actually become is another question altogether.

Real estate professionals are invited to become part of the site and even promote themselves (adding a link to your user profile) as long as you follow the guidelines established in their Good Neighbor Policy.

No sense of how they plan on monetizing the site – not even the ubiquitous Google Ads right now. I think with a few more smart content partnerships (Turnhere’s neighborhood videos for example, or Trulia’s neighborhood data) this site could take on the big Z and turn into a great consumer neighborhood resource.

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Popular heatmap mashup Neighboroo (see Top 10 Real Estate 2.0 Sites) rolled out a new version of their site today, adding a slew of new features and rolling in a couple new data sources and overall, a much tighter design.

In its previous form, Neighboroo took publicly available data (largely from census data) and plotted it visually on a Google Maps interface. In its latest incarnation, it adds property data (housing costs) from Trulia, real time market activity (in select markets) from Altos Research and neighborhood video from Turnhere.

All of this content makes researching a neighborhood on Neighboroo a particularly rich experience. I could definitely see this site being useful to someone facing a major relocation or looking to move to a new city.

A search can start with a zip code or just by navigating the map interface. There is a secondary search page that allows you to break down a search into numerous color coded criteria, but unfortunately I found this kind of confusing and overly complex. An interesting concept that just doesn’t translate into a particularly usable interface, in my opinion.

In this release they’ve also rolled out Local Sponsorship opportunities, presumably for small businesses to advertise on individual zip codes. The setup apes Zillow’s new EZAds and are just a good a deal; sponsorship is little more than $1/day. Pretty affordable advertising really and a reasonable revenue stream for the young company.

This is just the type of site that one of the major real estate portals, someone like Yahoo! Real Estate, MSN or AOL would do well to acquire. Neighboroo, with scrappy attitude and some smart partnerships has built a compelling, sticky research tool that beats out most of what those mainstream media portals currently offer.

More coverage: Inman News Blog

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