If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then the founder of the Clozing definitely has no qualms calling his new site the “Techmeme for Real Estate”.

Launched today by Sellsius blog head Joe Ferrara and his partner Anthony Barba, The Clozing is meant to be “your real estate water cooler”. It aggregates and displays real estate headlines from across the Net. Feeds from various sources are mixed together and displayed as stories break. The site hopes to make money through sponsored posts from advertisers that are highlighted on the right of the mix.

I love the idea personally. Techmeme remains one of the few sites I make a habit of monitoring throughout the day. Having a source of great real estate related links could be a really useful outpost to head to daily.

Nevertheless I have a few minor quibbles and suggestions for the Clozing on launch day.

The related stories algorithm seems to need some tweaking, as many of the headlines seemed to draw in random discussions. A story on IDX on Agentgenius.com was somehow linked to an announcement on Rismedia about a Green Resource website, for example.

For the Clozing to be truly useful, the relevance of the supporting discussions must remain high, at the risk of alienating the users. Given a generous allowance for launch day bugs, the Clozing ought to fix this quickly – else run the risk of going the way of RealEstateVoices.com – a much ballyhoo’d Digg clone that launched in 2006 and fizzled quickly.

Also – I wonder how truly safe it is to rely on a single source of authority (blog links) these days, given that much of the online discussion has moved quickly onto new platforms. News is increasingly shared and disseminated via social networks like Twitter so finding the fast moving conversations and links that are shared via those tools (like http://tweetmeme.com/) will be a must-have feature for the Clozing.

All in all though – it’s a great start and a nice addition to my daily bookmarks.

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Compiled by the folks at GlobalEdge, a list of the top 100 bloggers and real estate journalists from around the world makes up The GlobalEdge Top 100.

Their methodology, from their site:

This list was compiled by searching Google’s top 100 results using terms like “real estate blog” and “property news”. In this respect it is biased towards English-language sites. We also searched the blog rolls of some of the biggest blogs in the UK, US and to a lesser extent the rest of the world to add to the list. It took us several weeks to compile a list of over two hundreds sites. We then used the SEOMoz Trifecta tool to rank the importance and notoriety of the sites most relevant web page (we link to the page we ranked).

As a result, the list is a curious mishmash of news sources, portals, blogs and other web-based sources but interesting nonetheless. I picked up a number of new sites I’d never seen before.

This blog comes in at #35 and it’s nice to see some other familiar faces in the mix too; Geek Estate Blog, Saint Paul Real Estate Blog, the Tomato and the Phoenix Real Estate Guy to name just a few.

Looking for some more international flavor for your readers? Check out  The Rat & Mouse for peek into the UK Market, the always interesting Renthusiast and, for slice of Oz, Business2.com.au.

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I have new found respect for what the Zillow folks must go through every time they release a new version of their site.

We just spent the weekend pushing the new Inman News site live.

You can see the result over on Inman.com right now.  I should warn you the site is getting hammered right now so it’s running vvveeerrrry slllooowwwly.

To give you some background on the new site:

• We started work on this project almost a year ago, shortly after I joined Inman News.
• The goal was to bring all our web properties (Connect, InmanWiki, News, Blog, InmanTV) under one tent and tie them all together. Easier said than done with multiple platforms and languages (Wordpress, Typepad, MediaWiki, ASP, HTML)!
• Inman.com is now a LAMP site.
• We wanted to kick open the doors to the archives and still provide valuable new offerings to Inman members.
• We wanted to explore the social/community side of news like the folks at FastCompany and USAToday did, so we introduced some limited social networking elements to the new site. But we were definitely conscious of ’social network fatigue’ and didn’t want to replicate experiences already found elsewhere online.
• We also felt it necessary to include a number of new voices in our new home, so we built a fantastic real estate blog network (that includes FOREM, natch) and invited some well known bloggers to join our team.
• The site is built on the Drupal platform, a very powerful open source CMS system; with a ton of customization done by Toolhouse Design, our development team.
• This is only version 1.0 – we have some very cool stuff scheduled on the roadmap, which we hope to be rolling out over the coming months. So stay tuned.

I hope you like it!

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When I originally started at eppraisal a couple years ago I discussed the idea of creating a service that would allow someone to sell and buy a house online. It would be an end-to-end transaction with all of the documents and tie-ins to vendors that might be needed to make that work. I quickly realized what a challenge that might be.

The Real Estate Journal is reporting on a new real estate web product called RealUmbrella that positions itself as the one-stop-shop for FSBO transactions. My first inclination was to think, “is this a Redfin clone?” It isn’t, it’s much more like that idea I was chomping on back in 2005.

Their basic offering is this: for $349 – $949 you can utilize their services, which will give you a bunch of tools to market your property and will give you all the legal documents to transact a real estate sale online with a buyer in real time – no agent necessary.

Most real estate agents will think this is ludicrous, and many home buyers and sellers will tend to steer clear of this type of a service. That doesn’t matter though. As long as there is a significant enough percentage of people willing to use RealUmbrella, they will do well. It’s a large industry and there is room enough for multiple business types.

Will this disintermediation of real estate agents matter? No more than the general FSBO market already does. The other 98% of the real estate industry can continue doing their own thing, and will continue to do well/not well depending up on their own actions.

Of course their claims use all the normal anti-establishment rhetoric used to garner attention. Understandable and expected. What I want to see is if they can pull it off and if they truly can create a paradigm shift in buyer/seller behavior.

I’m interested in hearing from someone who uses their service, so let me know if you have plans on being a guinea pig for the rest of us!

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Matt Carter on the Inman News Blog and his take on the future of real estate. Some of the best analysis I’ve read recently.

Granted, I’m biased (full disclosure: I work for Inman News) – but seriously, go read.

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The lumbering beast that is Move.com is slowly transforming itself and just like a snake, it’s shedding it’s skin – but can it really get rid itself of an overwhelmingly negative reputation in this industry?

I think it’s trying to, with some degree of success.

They’ve scored some small scale PR victories of late with initiatives like sponsoring the Danny and Nina blog (which, by the way, was interesting when they were trying to decide where to live – but has degenerated into a boring personal lifeblog…. count me among the unsubscribed).

Technologically, they’ve made the leap into Real Estate 2.0 recently by leveraging Microsoft’s Virtual Earth platform for its new search tools (see Virtual Earth, a developer blog : Move.com Now Using Virtual Earth).

They’ve done a pretty neat integration that’s light years ahead of where they used to be. They still default to a hierarchal list of properties in the search results which is annoying, though you can easily switch to a map view.

They’ve added custom icons on the map that when you roll over they display expandable links that give greater detail of the property, including a bird’s eye view (note to Move.com developers – doesn’t play nice in Firefox in Mac OSX though).

It’s a nice implementation, though personally, I like the Extate and Redfin approach of moving that information off the map and to a side panel – I think it makes for a cleaner search experience.

Then comes the news that they’ve pulled in a new president in from Yahoo! and that David Lereah, NAR Chief Economist, is joining the team too. (That should make the folks at David Lereah Watch pretty happy).

It looks like Allan Dalton’s cooking up something big with his $6 million stealth project and it should be interesting to see what it is when it’s finally released… By the way, anyone with any inside information, let me know – futureofrealestate [at] gmail.com… anonymity guaranteed…

So can they execute on this transformation? I’m betting they can. There will be those who bear a grudge and they still have a long way to go to heal all old wounds. But the reality is they are a significant force to contend with and, even with all this new competition around them, just like any beast – they are the most dangerous when they’re backed into a corner.

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Jeff, the Xbroker, has slowly been leaking details of his newest venture, RealEspace, over the last few days. What is RealEspace? Well, no-one really knows just yet, but details are emerging. From a recent post at The XBroker, Jeff describes RealEspace as:

* A Best-of-Breed user interface to search property listings, backed by robust demographical analytics and localized content provided by qualified agents on the ground

* A single point of entry, syndicated listing solution for real estate professionals

* A transparent wholesale mortgage search engine—100% anonymous, automated mortgage pre-qualification

* A mortgage broker network offering true flat-fee, full-disclosure loans—you see what they see

* Standardized video tour production & marketing services

Reading through the list, these are lofty goals and while RealEspace hopes to raise millions in their first round of VC funding (see RSS Pieces) – it’s going be a tough play for them to take on some of the more entrenched players like Zillow or Trulia in the search game.

I do wish them well, and I suspect they have some interesting cards up their sleeve, but it seems to me they’d be best focusing on some of the smaller, under served segments with this push, rather then spreading themselves too thin trying to be everything to everyone right out of the gates.

Personally, like sellsius, I’m most interested in what they can do with a mortgage search engine. I think this is a critically overlooked space right now – one that is screaming out for improvement (can anyone say subprime meltdown?) and has been largely ignored by the Real Estate 2.0 revolution. One that could definitely benefit from Jeff’s experience.

Speaking as someone who is gearing up for a home purchase themselves, I find myself increasingly dissatisfied with all the mortgage tools that exist out there already. I’d love to see a place where I could research the loans available to me, find out what I qualify for and then contact a reputable mortgage broker; rather than having my email address and phone number snatched away from me and resold to some money-grubbing loan shark before I get any answers.

If nothing else I’m looking forward to seeing what these guys can pull off. Especially anything that involves a greased pig.

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Great piece in today’s NY Times on the trend of the “property entertainment” on channels such as HGTV and A&E.

TV Land – New York Times

I’ll admit I’ve sat down and watch a few of these shows from time to time, but I don’t find them terribly entertaining. If I’m going to watch “reality” television I want it to involve a desert island or people eating bugs.

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The pace of blogging at FoREM has slowed a bit over the last few days. I’ve been buried wrapping up a number of projects for my current employer before I make a pretty significant transition.

I’m happy to announce I will be joining the nice folks over at Inman News, as of March 26. I will be joining them to help steer some of their social media projects as well as drive marketing to their popular semiannual Connect Conferences.

Inman News has always been at the forefront of covering and promoting
real estate technology, so I naturally saw them as a perfect fit for me. I will however, continue to blog here at FoREM.

Brad Inman, Jessica Swesey and the rest of the team have been very welcoming and I’d like to publicly thank them for that.

I’m excited for what we’ll be able to accomplish together. Stay tuned.

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Hitwise, the Internet traffic ranking service, just released its US Real Estate Report for February 2007. The report is based on a sample audience of 10 million US Internet users. It’s kind of like Nielsen numbers for the ‘Net.

Top 30 Real Estate Websites

(click on thumbnail to get a larger image)

My observations:

• Move.com is on the march… Maybe Dustin Luther’s guerilla marketing tactics are paying off with some new eyeballs.
• MSN Real Estate is slipping. No surprise here. There’s been little to no development of this portal – certainly no new features to speak off. Looks like it’s getting left in the dust.
• HouseValues perking up? After a long slump HouseValues has made a significant jump in the rankings. I’ve been seeing a lot of HouseValues’ commercials on my local cable channels lately – I’m guessing this renewed advertising blitz is paying off in some traffic to the beleaguered destination.

Top Search Terms

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My observations:

• Zillow.com in the Top 10 means all its PR initiatives have paid off big time in huge brand awareness. This company has done little to no traditional marketing. That’s quite an achievement.
• Brand slugfest. Remax demolishes all other brands in searches. Coldwell Banker and Century21 are playing catchup.

Speaking of search, in a related post on Hitwise’s blog, Bill Tancer drills down into the connection between Google and Real Estate. Apparently, the Mountain View giant is responsible for 16% of the total traffic to real estate sites.

He also points out that Google Base is enjoying some success too – largely due to applications utilizing its database. Realogy’s 500,000+ listings are bound to help them out too (see Trulia Lands the Big One). According to Tancer, the following verticals are the most popular uses of Google Base.

• Employment 15.7%
• Real Estate 13.1%
• Auto Classifieds 11.9%
• Recipes: 7.1%
• Retail: 4.6%
• News: 3.4%

I’m still not entirely clear what Google’s end goal is with Google Base – but it’s clear its use for real estate is growing substantially.

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