OK, not quite. But in what’s officially the first of what will surely be a long line to come (and no, I’m not talking about the folks lining up for an iPhone), UK property search engine Nestoria has just released a Nestoria Facebook Application.

It’s not a huge technical leap, but I’m impressed. Adding the Nestoria’s Flat Search application to your Facebook account allows you to search directly in Facebook for property to buy, rent or share. Kind of a no-brainer, but it works as promised. Listings are pulled from Nestoria’s database while outbound links are still passed on directly to the property manager or listing agent’s website.

Some neat interactivity in the app lets you share the listings with anyone else in your network. Presumably this could be a good way for roommates or even a husband and wife team to collaborate on finding a new home.

The Flat Search app also returns a chronological listing of all the places you’ve searched, which is displayed on your profile, under your “Wall” (Facebook users will know what I’m talking about). Nestoria says this so your friends can see what you’ve been searching and offer you advice on the areas. Not sure how useful that is, but then again I’m not sure how useful half the things in Facebook are – but it’s still fun. Thankfully, you can turn it off if you want.

Like I said, I suspect this won’t be the last real estate app we’ll see in Facebook (see Facebook Could Make or Break Real Estate 2.0). I’m sure Trulia, Zillow and the other Real Estate 2.0 players have their eyes on the FB demographic and we may even see some of the more innovative real estate brokers dip their toes in the water too (see Coldwell Banker Opens Office in Second Life).

Moreover, you’re starting to see real dollar transactions take place in the Facebook environment. Lending Club, which bills itself as a P2P (person-to-person) lender has closed over $100,000 in loans to Facebook users.

This is pretty interesting. It’s not that much of stretch to see that that at some point, real estate transactions could be conducted through a virtual environment.

Sure, it’s a long way’s off before someone will closing the sale of a house in Facebook, but it’s not inconceivable to think that you couldn’t find your home, prequalify for a mortgage and line up all your inspections inside a social network, leaving you only to tour the house and sign the final paperwork in “meatspace”.

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Brokers, so how are you going to deal with Google’s Universal Search?

How are people going to find your site? If you didn’t already realize it, you’re already scrapping it out for increasingly limited screen space.

Google has already dropped local search results into its organic search results (see Google Implements Local Search Results). Take a search for “realtor san francisco“, for example. Zephyr Real Estate is the highest ranked naturally occurring search result on the front page, but it’s been squeezed out at the top of the fold by Saxe Real Estate and Herth Real Estate.

Individual Realtor’s blogs are already nipping at your heels; Portland Real Estate Blog is now the #3 result returned for search on “portland real estate” – other markets will be similar I presume. It they’re not there now, they should be soon. Now you’ll likely get squeezed out by video in other key search words.

If you’re really going drive search engine traffic to your site, forget about your homepage. Marketing a single destination is going to be an expensive and frustrating process with very little in terms of guaranteed results.

Instead, focus on your listing pages. The listing page is the new landing page.

How should you do this?

Make sure your listing pages fully indexable by search engine spiders. Dump the obscure database calls in your URLs – take a page from the blogs and fill your URLs with keyword rich permalinks.

Work with the search engines, not against them. Whether it be Google or Trulia – ultimately, it doesn’t matter how your listings are found. Your goal should be to keep people there once they’ve arrived. Focusing on avoiding the dreaded “bounce”.

Speak like a human being. I don’t know what sec-lit, inst-hw or bi-rang means. Don’t just spew out every field in the MLS, show me what I want and arrange it such a way it makes sense to the average Joe

Learn from Amazon.com. Build some intelligence into your listing pages and cross sell me some similar properties if the one I’ve arrived at doesn’t meet my expectations.

Give me a rich experience. Listing pages are almost universally boring. Like this one from RE/MAX or this one from Coldwell Banker. Build in new media. Let your Realtors add video or audio descriptions of the property.

Seth Godin says it best. Blow up your home page. Your listings will literally become your new “home” pages.

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Sellsius Real Estate finally launched last week. Two of the most prolific real estate bloggers have finally unleashed their vision on the industry.

Sellsius calls itself as enhanced classified engine under the banner “hot listings, cool tools” and the idea is to create a open community where Realtors can promote themselves and their clients’ properties. They also want to open the door to all associated professionals to promote themselves as well. All members will be able to post unlimited ads for $29.95 a year.

Building a community is something which I have no doubt that the guys at Sellsius are capable of doing – but building an effective advertising platform means at some point, they’re going to have to chase consumer eyeballs and show their advertisers some ROI.

To do that however, they face the proverbial chicken and egg problem, or, as I like to call it, the listing and consumer problem. And can they find the consumers?

They face an uphill climb against more entrenched competitors like Edgeio, Oodle and the venerable craigslist – not to mention all the local newspaper’s web efforts, who are also chasing local advertising dollars online and have much deeper consumer brand presence.

For agents, a more direct comparison might be Postlets or vFlyer; who also allow agents to manage individual listings but have much richer feature sets.

But the one thing those two companies don’t have is a true sense of community around their product – which is just what Sellsius has spent the last year cultivating. And if that’s the secret, then maybe, just maybe, they’ll come out ahead.

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If you thought Trulia has had a tough time trying to pull together all US based listings into a single unified search tool, imagine what Properazzi.com had to accomplish.

They’ve just launched an early beta version of the first pan-European property search tool; so whether you’re hunting for property in Hungary, searching for a apartment in Spain, or checking out a house in the Czech Republic – there’s almost 1.3 million properties on this site for you to peruse.

What sets Properazzi apart from the pack, at least in my mind anyway, are the particular challenges they’ve had to overcome to pull this off; namely that they have had to provide the search tool in over 90 different currencies and more than 25 languages. (Which begs the question, when will see even a Spanish language version of any of the US based realty search tools?)

Properazzi has chosen to adopt a radius search interface similar to Realty Roundup (see New Real Estate Search Mashups). You can choose the size of the radius and click on an area of the map to narrow down the search results. Unfortunately, once you are past the first page, the properties themselves are not geocoded so there is no map available of your results. There also doesn’t seem to be many options to either reset or refine your search. Hopefully these are kinks that will be worked out in future versions.

All in all though, an impressive first step. As Renthusiast points out, Properazzi has been shortlisted as one of the Red Herring 100 most promising private ventures in Europe. More on the Properazzi blog.

Properazzi is based in Barcelona, Spain.

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Redfin added neighborhood and school data to its listing pages today, something some of the big brokers like RealLiving and Coldwell Banker have already done (see Big Brokers Going Local).

Visiting their site, I wasn’t entirely clear at first where on the listing page to find this information, it wasn’t immediately obvious ‘above the fold‘.

Scrolling down a bit and there, wedged between the sales history and Zillow Zestimate for the property, I found what I was looking for.

Surprisingly, clicking on either of the links takes you to an external page. I was expecting it to be built into Redfin’s listing pages. You can click here to view an example. Like RealLiving, Redfin’s neighborhood data is provided through a partnership with OnBoard LLC.

Overall the implementation is pretty decent. I far prefer Redfin’s approach to RealLiving’s, as they make extensive use of graphs and charts to provide some visual impact to the data.

One frustrating thing I found with the external page, was that when I tried to click back from the neighborhood data to the listing I came from, Redfin’s site would take me back the general search results page and not to the specific home I wanted to view. This got annoying as I was shopping around looking at different homes.

Community/local information continues to be the next big push for brokers looking to add more value to their search pages. While they are steps in the right direction, I haven’t seen anything yet that come close to the depth of information that Zillow, Trulia or Shackprices are offering.

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vFlyer, the classified flyer a.k.a. single property website, has released a slew of features recently including video and the ability to put your listings on your site through a widget (see vFlyers Lets You Put Listings on Your Blog). They’re now offering a limited time discount and an opportunity to customize their widgets for 25 lucky participants.

From an email I received today:

We are piloting a custom widget program for the next 30 days. We are offering a custom flash or javascript widget for just $249. This program is offered to those that have either a monthly or annual business subscription. This is limited to the first 25 orders. If interested in learning more, email customwidget@vflyer.com.Also for the next 14 days, we are offering a 20% discount on annual subscriptions. The referral code for this offering is “widget20annual“.

This is an interesting offer and reasonably priced, in my opinion. Especially to have a widget branded exclusively to a brokerage or personal brand identity.

Widgets give you an opportunity to test vFlyer as a listings management application that allows a Realtor to take their listings with them anywhere they have a presence online; that could be a MySpace profile, personal blog or ActiveRain account, or virtually anywhere else that allows placement of embed code.

One daily challenge I’ve found, is keeping up my presence on each of these social networks. It’s incredibly time consuming. But I don’t necessarily want to abandon any of them.

A widget would help feed new content to all my profiles without me having to manually maintain my profiles.

There’s also obvious marketing advantage for Realtors to having their listings attached to all of their social networking profiles. But far from simply finding new eyeballs and/or new buyers; being able to tell a home owner that you can market their home through these social networks might be a significant point of differentiation that may help Realtors secure new listings.

If anyone takes vFlyer up on their offer of a custom widget, let me know. I’ll blog about the result in a future post and post the widget on this site.

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vFlyer, the classified listings service, unveiled a new widget service to its members today that allow you to take your v-Flyer-hosted listings with you anywhere, including your blog.

Previous vFlyer coverage:

• vFlyer Posts Your Listings For You
• vFlyer Retools For Real Estate

vFlyer’s widget editor lets you customize either horizontal or vertical galleries, or if you have lots of listings you can create a scrolling display of images. You can choose to create either Flash or JavaScript widgets and vFlyer churns out the necessary HTML code to let you post it on your own website, a blog, social networks or online marketplaces like eBay.

Basic customizations like background color and link colors so you can better blend your widget in with the rest of your site. See the following example:

vFlyer is interesting as it’s morphing from being strictly a online classifieds platform into a single property web site provider (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?) and now to a full listings management package.

However, unlike total web site solutions like Ubertor, Top Producer and Point 2 Agent – vFlyer provides agents with a custom online marketing platform and inventory management system. You then have the ability to pipe that data into whatever environment you choose. That could be a Wordpress blog or even your existing web site.

What I really like about this idea because it allows you to be much more flexible in your hosting options and doesn’t tie to you to one exclusive provider for all your web business needs. This isn’t for everyone; but for more tech savvy Realtors, this “offsite” approach could give you the ability to pull together many disparate elements (blogs, forums, etc.) and other real estate widgets (see Real Estate Widgets for your Website) and create the ultimate real estate portal.

vFlyer currently lets you post up to 10 active flyers for free. Premium plan start at $19.95/month after that.

More coverage:

• VentureBeat » Vflyer releases classified ad widget

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Bloggers looking to monetize their web sites have lots of options; Google Ads, Text Link Ads and affiliate programs. (For more on this read Blogvertising: The Decision to Add Ads to Your Blog).

More recently, many bloggers (myself included) have taken to creating targeted job boards which aim to let employers connect each blog’s unique readership.

As yet though, there hasn’t been a truly real estate focused revenue stream for bloggers. Reallyo however, hopes to change that.

Like vFlyer or Postlets, Reallyo is a service that allows Realtors to create single page websites (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?); they they also provide a video hosting platform similar to WellcomeMat.

They contacted me earlier this month to become a test case for a new product they have rolled out – Reallyo Publisher, which allows bloggers to create and manage their very own plug and play, private-label real estate listings page.

You can see my example here: The Future of Real Estate Listings

Reallyo hosts the page (though you can choose to point a sub domain to the site) and you the publisher can choose your price for a listing. Reallyo handles the sale and the revenue is split between the two of you.

The idea is that a blogger’s endorsement (or personal brand) generates a certain amount of cachet that will translate into additional traffic to the listing, thus spurring Realtors to want to advertise there.

I’m not sure about that, but the idea is interesting. In essence you’re creating your own web-based classifeds page to service the community that has sprung up through your blog’s readership. Just like Rupert Murdoch, you’re creating your own mini media empire.

Anyway, if you’re a Realtor reading this – go ahead, throw your listings up on my listings page. It’s free. I’d love to hear what you think and whether you actually get any additional traffic from the page.

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