by seawallrunner

Among other things, my recent visit to Vancouver reassured me of two facts. First, the city remains an anomoly in a sea of bad real estate news. The city is on fire. Non stop foreign investment, the 2010 Winter Olympics and a constricted downtown core means there’s a forest of construction cranes and growing canopy of condos blanketing the city.

Second, Vancouver gets Web 2.0. But while it’s already spawned a number of success stories (Flickr, NowPublic) there hasn’t, to date, been much crossover between these two worlds.

Thankfully though it looks like that’s beginning to change.

And while speaking at the Real Estate Tech Meetup last night, I had a chance to meet with a couple of people who might be in a position to affect that change.

Jonathan Lyon is co-founder of MyRealPlace, a brand new Canadian real estate community web site. Realtors can blog about their local market conditions while consumers can search from over 20,000 properties pulled from MLS feeds.

I haven’t had a chance to explore it completely, but it sounds to me like a mix of ActiveRain and Trulia. If it does what it promises, it might just fill a curiously conspicuous hole in the Canadian market right now.

If there’s anyone out there who can help local Realtors understand Web 2.0, it’s Jordan Behan – president of Tell Ten Friends, a word of mouth marketing agency that helps business owners and fellow marketers understand the power of social media. Jordan’s a sharp guy and has lots of passion for the topic and it was great to meet him at an event like this (small world too, he was college roommates with my sister’s husband).

I covered a lot of ground in my 45 minutes on stage, and it sounds like the guys from Video Openhouse got a kick out of my presentation (so did the guy from MovieTours.ca) – I sure they especially liked it when I talked about why Realtors should be using video to market a property online.

Finally a big thanks to local condo sales powerhouse Ian Watt and regular FOREM reader Craig MacKenzie from Sea to Sky Premier Properties up in beautiful Whistler, British Columbia, for stopping by and saying hi after all was said and done. It was nice to see so many people out, despite the beautiful evening that I’m sure was beckoning people to the beach. For those of you I didn’t meet in person, thanks for coming out.

Of course, thanks again to the folks at Ubertor for organizing the event and having me come speak. Hopefully we can do it again soon.

Update: Vancouver Real Estate Meet Up Summary from the Sutton Blog.

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The Toronto Real Estate Blog announced Canada’s first map-based real estate search engine today. RealEstatePlus.ca aims to do to the Canadian market what Trulia has done in the US and Extate and Nestoria et al. have done in the U.K. Currently, it’s only available in Toronto however.

The site is nice enough on the eyes and is bathed in the now all-to-familiar pastel hues of Web 2.0. Overall, the design is inoffensive but uninspired, and largely feels kind of flat. But this should be easy enough to tweak in subsequent versions.

Functionally, the site is good first release.

Searches are conducted by neighborhood (for more on neighborhood search, see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) – though the experience of navigating down to the right neighborhood was a little clumsy. I think this was largely due to the small lag time that exists in displaying a hoverbox in Virtual Earth. You have to roll over the icon, wait for the popup and then click where you want to go. Slow and annoying.

Add to that, clicking on ‘View Listings’ takes you to a hierarchical list of properties rather than the map view that I was expecting. To get to the map view, you actually need to click on the ‘View Demographics” link – which struck me as a little unintuitive.

Once in a neighborhood (e.g., Summerhill) however, RealEstatePlus does a good job of outlining basic demographics as well as show you the properties for sale. They also do a nice job of layering in neighborhood specific information; like hospitals, police stations, schools, parks etc. – it reminded me a lot of Coldwell Banker’s implementation (see Big Brokers Going Local) of neighborhood specific information.

Clicking on a property listing (e.g., 52 Walker Ave) gives you most of what you’d expect. There’s a nifty dynamic slideshow of the property photos and the site cross-sells similar properties to the one you’re looking at. It’s not clear whether the listings are scraped from the Internet or pulled through some relationship with the local MLS.

It’s also not clear what the company’s revenue model is (other than Google Ads) though I imagine, just like its US and U.K. counterparts, that will evolve over time as well.

Looking even further North: Renthusiast reports Norway’s mashup Igglo now covers Olso

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