Coldwell Banker introduced a fresh take on real estate search today with the launch of its new web site at beta.coldwellbanker.com. Besides a tarted-up user interface, the new site offers a couple of intriguing new ideas that I think push the innovation needle in the right direction.

The first of which is the new site now knows where you live. It uses your IP address to figure out where you are searching from and automatically offers up properties from that area. IP address detection itself isn’t particularly new, but I like that the team behind the site are thinking of ways that it can be used to help streamline the real estate search process for consumers. What I’d really love to see however, is for this idea to be taken even one step further by integrating the location awareness built in to the new Firefox browser (see New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser).

Most notable however is CB’s new Bluescape search. Here’s their description from the press release

…allows consumers to give a ‘thumbs up’ or a ‘thumbs down’ to various images that are displayed – similar to how popular music sites learn users’ preferences based on how they rate different songs. After rating various photos, consumers can then submit a query and the BlueScape technology will identify homes that might be a fit. Developed to help consumers actively looking to purchase a home as well as those still in the “dreaming phase,” this visually driven approach to search is new to the real estate category.

The tool works exactly as described. You’re presented a series of seemingly random “lifestyle” and real estate related photos; photos of mountains, pools, different styles of homes etc. You give each photo a thumbs up or thumbs down rating and after a period of time you can ask Bluescape to return your results.

The process is actually kind of fun (although the music got a little annoying after a while). Presumably, the more photos you rate the more accurate your results are. But it would be nice if the site gave you some indication of how many images a user needs to rate before good results are returned. Personally I just kept clicking until I couldn’t take the music anymore.

The results Bluescape returned were definitely intriguing – and at a national level the results were fairly close to the images I’d flagged. When I filtered the results to my local area however, things got a little rougher. For some reason, Bluescape recommended I live in a strip mall. Hardly what I’d call my “dream” home.

I’m not sure this is a problem with the algorithm behind the suggestion engine or if it was just my taste in photos. Very well could be the latter.

In any case, despite a few little glitches like this (and the fact the site doesn’t play nice with Safari web browser), it’s great to see a brand like Coldwell Banker thinking creatively and outside the box when it comes to real estate search.

The goal for any real estate brokerage in the coming months is going to be how to differentiate your real estate search site from the sea of Google Maps and pushpin clones that exist out there. Finding your own unique take, or angle, on search while staying true to your brand will be the most challenging, and rewarding task ahead.

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I was getting on a plane this morning so I was only able to tweet this news.

Brian Boero at 1000Watt Consulting sums it up best.

Now, today, search engine land reports that Google has taken this one step further to include a unique page for every listing that includes photos, a map (including Street View) property details, directions, transit information and more. It’s a listing detail page, basically.

I wrote back in July that “the game’s about to get interesting” (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search). Today, with the launch of Place Pages for real estate, it just did.

It’s live right now in Australia. So we’ll wait and see when and if it gets announced State-side. But if I were Move or Trulia or any of the other property search portals worldwide, I’d be nervously crossing my fingers this stays in the southern hemisphere.

Read more about it at search engine land.

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From the Redfin Corporate Blog:

Big news! Redfin just announced a $10-million round of financing led by Greylock Partners’ James Slavet and his colleague David Thacker. Redfin’s group of existing investors — Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, DFJ, The Hillman Company — also pitched in on the round.

This new round of financing brings the total investment in the Seattle-based brokerage to just north of $30 Million. Greylock joins Madrona Venture Group, Draper Fisher Jurvertson, Vulcan Capital and the Hillman Company as investors in the firm.

Some key metrics released by Redfin in their blog post:

# Revenue exceeded a $20 million yearly run-rate and Redfin generated its first profits
# Redfin shipped the highest-rated iPhone application for real estate
# Site visits increased more than 200%
# Total dollar-value of Redfin transactions since inception exceeded $2 billion
# Redfin customer satisfaction remained at 97%

This news, coupled with the announcement that Realogy is in the black for Q3 surely means that things are starting to look up in the real estate space.

Congrats to all the Redfin crew.

More at Techcrunch.

Photo by aresauburn™

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The Realtors Property Resouce (RPR) is likely the most important technology story of the last few years. And it will probably be the most closely watched story for the next couple of years too.

What is the the RPR? Brian Boero from 1000Watt Blog sums it up nicely.

The NAR has taken over certain technology assets of Cyberhomes from LPS (formerly known as FNRES) in order to bring its RPR (Realtors Property Resource) project, as well as its consumer-facing play, HouseLogic, to market. To do this, they have created Realtors Property Resource, LLC – a wholly owned subsidiary of the NAR.

This is huge. A national database of over 140 million property records – eventually enhanced by property status (on or off market) data from MLSes around the country. A suite of tools built to allow Realtors to access and share this data with their clients. Even a stab at knocking off those pesky computer-generated Zestimates with a new RVM or “Realtor Valuation Model”.

This is huge. Rob Hahn,  calls it a “Coming Civil War” and a shot across the bow at the local MLSes — and it’s certainly is a bold move.

But ultimately RPR is an attempt (last-ditch?) for NAR to stay relevant to its membership – since the savviest of them have long been questioning the need for a national association.

Consumers can find reams of property data on any number of real estate search sites these days. Brokers and agents have a number of low-cost tools at their disposal to build a rich and compelling online experience. And most importantly these two groups can now connect in much more meaningful ways through social media.

As Jim Duncan, writing on Agent Genius, succinctly put it; “NAR recognized the need to be competitive“.

But frankly, I will be happily surprised, if the NAR/RPR can out innovate the innovators. While they have assembled quite a team behind the project, I worry that a monolithic enterprise like this will ultimately be doomed by legislative paralysis.

For NAR/RPR to truly take a run displacing the current status quo – they need to adopt the mindset of their free-market competitors. Do something really disruptive. Here’s a few ideas:

1. “Powered by NAR” – Build an API that will let engineers across the country to piggyback off of this data mine and build a thousand variations of the HouseLogic interface. Ask only for reciprocal link and acknowledgment of the source.
2. Offer a challenge like the Netflix Prize – A $1 million prize for the team that can take the base RVM algorithm and improve it.
3. Go open source – take a subset of the Cyberhomes code and release it to the world under a GNU General Public License – let the developers go wild and help improve the experience for all.

RPR is an important first step for NAR to take – but I’d like to see them go even further.

It’s time for a really big leap to restore the faith.

Update: You can now watch the introductory webinar in its entirety.

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A guest post from Tim Fagan, CEO of HomeFinder.com

A while back I was in the audience at an industry conference when a woman on stage asked this question: “At the end of the day, do any of these online real estate companies really help anyone buy or sell a home?”

My initial reaction – as someone running one of “these” companies – was to dismiss the question as gratuitous, and dead wrong.

She’s just trying to provoke the audience. We provide all kinds of information on our site – of course we’re helping. And that’s what a REALTOR is there for anyway. So what’s the problem?

But the question kept creeping back into my head in the following weeks, prodding me to dig deeper into our value proposition and think about what it would take to answer “yes,” unequivocally.

How could we at HomeFinder.com – and, for that matter, my colleagues and competitors elsewhere in online real estate – provide a more essential service? And while our REALTOR partners would always be the ones who would get properties bought and sold, what could we do to help them get to that goal more efficiently?

Doing this, of course, would not be easy. The online real estate category is a crowded place. Consumers can view listings on myriad sites, all of which offer functionality that is strikingly similar. A set of standards and best practices has emerged as a result – which is good – but with that comes a pressure to stick to proven formulas, familiar features and accept assumptions as to what an online real estate site should and should not do. And that can be quite limiting.

So how do we move forward? I don’t have clear answers yet, but here are some things I believe to be true:

We need to take more risks

This sounds trite, but it’s true. When is the last time an online real estate company did something that made you think, “Wow, that’s gutsy?” Putting real estate listings online in 1994 was gutsy; Zillow took a big risk offering home values online ten years later. But who’s sticking their neck out now? It’s been awhile.

At the beginning of 2009, we expanded from being a technology provider to major newspapers across the country, previously known as Homescape, to rebranding as HomeFinder.com and growing our business to become a world-class home search and information site. While this is a goal we continue to strive toward, the HomeFinder.com name change was both a catalyst and reminder of not only what our site and our competitor sites offer, but also what consumers truly want — to find a home.

Granted, this isn’t Page Six material. But we’re relatively new to the game and that also puts us in a position to more easily escape our own history than others. That’s an opportunity I plan to capitalize on.

Online real estate needs more big moves.

It’s not just about a house, it’s about living a life

Having all the listings – including FSBO’s – is something we at HomeFinder pride ourselves on. But we need to understand that for most people, the house is just part of what goes into a decision to live somewhere.

To make that important decision more effectively, consumers need to get a sense for what lies beyond the four walls of the home they see on the screen. Sure, most sites offer school ratings, basic demographic information and some high-level housing market data.

But today we can go beyond that. The emergence of the “Real-time Web” allows us to capture what’s happening now in any given place, to hear the ambient noise of a neighborhood. The number of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) makes exciting mashups of place-based images, video and data possible in ways we could online imagine just a year or two ago.

It’s time to innovate in these areas.

A more effective model: better connect home finders with home sellers

Recently, a small storm erupted over a pornographic advertisement appearing on Realtor.com. While this was entirely inadvertent (apparently the result of an error in their ad serving system) it did underscore a point: The largely ad-based online real estate category often delivers a less-than-optimal user experience.

Ads, featured listings and the like can be quite effective for our agent and broker partners. But for consumers, they often just get in the way.

How can we deliver a better experience that gets consumers where they want to go more efficiently, while also placing our broker and agent customers in the right place, at the right time, on the right platform?

We’re working on some of the answers at HomeFinder.com as I write.

Call to action

In the end, the conference panelist’s question was not an annoyance – it was a call to action. To deliver even more value to consumers and practitioners. To rethink the online real estate formula. To challenge ourselves to question those things we take for granted.

I do not have many answers at this point, just directional notions like those I list above. But I’ll get there.

If you’d like to have your writing featured on FOREM blog, please email us at futureofrealestate@gmail.com

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French company MeilleurAgents.com (“best agents”) has released a mobile Android application that displays the value of every single building in Paris (value is displayed in price per square meter). Here’s a quick video demonstrating it in action:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6006262[/vimeo]

The application is very similar to Zillow’s iPhone app (see Zillow Takes Zestimates to the Streets); which also displays home values – but for me, the street level view is far more visually exciting than the top-down, satellite view presented in Zillow’s app.

The MeilleurAgents.com app uses the Layar Reality browser, and the app will be available shortly for the iPhone 3GS in France.

The release of iPhone 3.1 update now technically allows apps to overlay graphics on a live video stream, so we’re inching closer to true augmented reality. Some apps in the US already take advantage of this, the Yelp app’s hidden monocle feature for example.

The promise for augmented reality real estate applications is certainly exciting; virtual for-sale signs and property descriptions, even the layering of interior room photos over exterior views of home.

I’m sure  we’ll be seeing much more of these sort of apps in the months to come.

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Dothomes.com is for sale.

Google PR 4. Yours for the right price.

Dothomes was one of a number of overseas property portal sites that tried in the last few years to make their way on to US shores. Turns out playing in the US market is much more complicated than they thought.

Much ballyhooed at the time (see DotHomes is in the Running), Dothomes was a product of BytePlay Ltd, which also had a presence in the UK and South Africa – no word if those sister sites will stay active though.

The reason for the sale? From the founder directly, “real estate was never our cup of tea…”

So the company is changing their strategy to provide “enterprise data acquisition solutions in UK.” The sale of Dothomes will be conducted by private auction and will conclude October 1st. I’ve asked for a link to the auction site, and will post here as soon as I can.

Globrix, the News Corp backed site, is the only overseas portal that I’ve heard is still pondering a US based entry. News of Dothomes’ retreat may make them a little more wary however.

Photo courtesy of wizardofthefiretopmountain

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Says CEO Glenn Kelman, via Techcrunch

…the run rate is around $15 million. 2007 revenues were $5 million, 2006 revenues were $1 million.

Congrats to all the folks at Redfin. Their model, while clearly controversial, seems to be succeeding.

Their web site is world class (see 10 Kick Ass Real Estate Search Sites) and the company has pushed a number of novel consumer-focused ideas lately; including introducing ratings for all of its agents.

Now the road to profitability has been rocky (see Redfin Downsizes To Keep Swimming) but this is definitely good news for the Seattle-based brokerage.

Hopefully we continue to hear much more from them in the future.

Photo by buildingresults

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In my post New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser, I asked the following question around the new browser’s location awareness capability.

So the race is on – which will be the first site to implement this feature? Any bets?

Well today, we have a winner. That was fast.

The blue circle has come to your desktop with Google Maps. If you’ve use the Maps app on your iPhone you’ll know what I’m talking about.

When you visit Google Maps with a supported web browser, you’ll see a new My Location button in the top left corner of the map. Simply click the button to center the map to your approximate location. If your location can be determined accurately enough, it’s shown with a blue circle, just like on Google Maps for Mobile. Click the button again to remove the blue circle, or to re-center the map after you’ve moved it away.

Combine this feature with the new embedded real estate searches in Maps (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search) and you’re starting to see the foundation of a really slick application.

Something that might live in the new Google Chrome OS perhaps?

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Realogy brand Better Homes and Gardens launched its revamped web site. Lots of new content, including a revamped video section and brand new video platform (provided by Brightcove). All very cool and it looks great.

So while visiting the new site it also gave me a chance to have another look at BHG’s search tool, which I hadn’t played with for a while.

I can definitely say that it has one of the nicest user interfaces of any major real estate brand web site and rivals (even exceeds) many of the third party search sites. I have to agree with Greg at Vendor Alley who writes “[it is] simply gorgeous, and very intuitive.”

It has some really nice subtle touches – like filtering by the age of the home. And I loved how the search results are grouped in to price brackets. Also geeks like me are going to love you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results.

It all shows me that they really spent some time thinking through how a real estate consumer will perform a search and how they want to get the data returned.

Problem is, as gorgeous as the site is… it doesn’t seem to work.

Just like Greg – I was surprised how few listings it returned in my neighborhood (zip code 97219). Only 29 listings on BHG versus 460 on Realtor.com and 466 on a local broker’s website.

Weird.

Another beef is that it seems totally borked in Safari 4.0.

I could not get the site to do any kind of search on my Mac. Clicking around on the buttons or drop-downs did absolutely nothing. This forced me to fire up my backup browser Firefox, which also gave me some weird display errors in FF 3.5.

Granted these are both very new versions of each browser, so it’s not surprising to find these kind of hiccups.

I hope these two errors are simply launch day bumps. I know how hard it is to come out of the gates with something that works with every machine, in every instance – it can be a truly Herculean task.

But I hope these kinks get ironed out quickly. It’d be a shame to spoil such a great experience with small little bugs like these.

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