Ask any number of Realtors what is one thing they feel like they are an “expert” in, and they will most likely say “the neighborhood they work in.” One of the best parts of working with a local Realtor is the expertise they have about your local community and neighborhoods.

However, sometime neighborhood information is fragmented with certain key elements missing.

Last week, an intriguing new Atlanta-based tech start up called HomeElephant launched.

I spoke to one of the founders, and asked him the “why” for this site. He said,

“The founders were all apathetic neighbors, and all agreed we needed a better way to communicate with neighbors.  I have lived on Karland Drive in Buckhead (Atlanta) for 12 years, and only know 6 neighbors.  Not proud of it.  Another founder, Chandler Powell, his wife was harassed by a creep in a van while he was away on business, the police didn’t help, and he wanted a better way to alert his neighbors of these types of incidents.  Home Elephant was born soon after. Think of HomeElephant as a less intimate version of Facebook with built in communication tools that all center around a map view of your streets.”

In just less than a week, HomeElephant has 221 neighborhoods with almost 2000 registered users.

As a real estate professional, I think this site could be a great resource for a few reasons:

1. I really like that HomeElephant creates access to neighborhood directories, neighbor profiles, school info and HOA documents – all in one easy portal.
2. For users of the site, they can create a neighborhood watch, report a lost and found, find out about street closings and more.
3. From a social perspective, neighborhood events and important dates could be organized like a yard sale, dates of trash pick up, or an open house. All event dates can sync to your calendar.

Overall, I think this could be a great neighborhood resource for real estate agents and I’m excited to see how agents and brokers will embrace it.

Have you signed up for HomeElephant yet? I’d love your opinion about this site and this service – leave me your feedback below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News, @katielance

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I stumbled across this site last night and just had to pick up a beautiful screen print of Portland’s neighborhoods.

Ork Posters prints beautiful neighborhood maps for cities across the US; including Seattle, Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago,DC and Philly, among others. The maps are designed by Jenny Beorkrem from trimtabdesign.com.

For the true font-o-phile, these works are wonderful typographic inspiration. But regardless, they would look great hanging in your office or conference room and make for a great conversation piece. Also would be a fantastic thank you gift; especially for any relocation clients moving in to a new city.

Posters are printed with soy-based ink on 100% recycled paper. Various color styles are available for each city and they run between $22 and $27 a pop.

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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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[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba_oOjoSJx8[/youtube]

Since launching its F8 platform, the social network Facebook has seen a staggering number of applications developed for it. So many that it verging on becoming a menace – I’m already getting overwhelmed with updates from people who have questions they want answered, or some Pirate games they want me to install.

Despite the noise there is still some very interested work being done with Facebook. Some innovative developers are using the network to reach out to the community at large and get the “wisdom of the crowd” to enhance their databases. An example of this is the Cities I’ve Visited app, which was developed by TripAdvisor – I suspect as a way for them to compile a list of the most popular travel destinations.

One of the early movers in the real estate space is the Neighborhoods application, which was developed and launched by the real estate web site provider Point2 Technologies. It’s a pretty popular application – as of this afternoon it had 21,136 daily active users. Testament to its widespread appeal, it even got a nice nod from the Lost Remote TV Blog recently.

I asked the guys at Point2 for some hard numbers from this project and this is what had for me.

User Base Growth

As of Aug. 31: 1:00 p.m. – 84,370 users…

Daily growth rate is 5,000 to 7,500…Growth rate is doubling every 5 to 10 days at present

29 countries available/active…will continue to add to it

Very impressive numbers.

But what’s even more interesting here, when you dig deeper, is that Neighborhoods is tapping the viral nature of Facebook apps to refine Point2’s database of hyperlocal neighborhoods. It’s getting the Facebook users themselves to tell Point2 where they live. To suggest new neighborhoods where the none may already exist, to correct errors where they exist. It’s rather like conducting a huge Census survey. For free.

Many Real Estate 2.0 sites are out there right now trying to tap the crowd (e.g. my-currency, Zillow) to build out their content but, in my opinion, they are using a flawed Field of Dreams approach (“If you build it, they will come”) to grow the datasets on their sites.

Neighborhoods, on the other hand, is an interesting experiment of the reverse. Don’t make the crowds come to you, go to where the crowds are. Leverage that huge user base and put them to work for you.

It doesn’t stop there either. Point2 has successfully used the traffic as a way to feature listings from its agent pool, and is seeing very good results.

As for traffic back to agent listings, we are tracking around 12+/- percent of total daily users viewing the listings, which is very encouraging.

When F8 first launched, I suggested a few applications that could be developed on the platform (see Facebook Could Make or Break Real Estate 2.0). Three months on, I’m surprised there have been few takers. Perhaps these numbers will shake them out of their slumber.

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