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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NeighborCity is an real estate search site that operates in 20 markets across the country. Like Estately and a handful of others, NeighborCity is also a brokerage and as a result, gets access to the MLS and is able to display all the active listings in those markets.

But NeighborCity is taking it one step further. It’s also displaying all the active agents in those markets and suggesting them alongside any searches done on the site. Right now it has profiles built for over 45,000 agents.

The premise is pretty simple, really; say I’m searching for a $400K single family home in the 97219 ZIP of Portland, Oregon – in addition to all the property listings that meet my criteria, NeighborCity is also going to suggest the best agent for my business. In this example, it says it is Dave Hrabal of Windermere.

They’re calling the service AgentMatch and it uses a proprietary algorithm to rank agents based on their relevance to the user’s search criteria – based on variables like price range, property type, neighborhood and the agents’ past performance.

If they’re interested in seeing the home, the buyer can choose to contact any of the suggested agents and the agent can respond to the inquiry with additional details on their commission structure and/or their individual specialties. Consumers get to stay anonymous until they’ve chosen an agent to work with.

Agents can also claim their profiles to provide more information to prospective clients. Presumably, there is some sort of referral fee paid out for any clients that come through the site.

We’ve seen agent matching sites before (Incredible Agents and Homethinking spring to mind) but this is the first site that I’ve seen that marries agent discovery so close to the property search touchpoint. It’s rather like the recommended items on Amazon.com – and I kind of liked the experience.

While it’s bound to be controversial (as any kind of computer generated valuation generally is) – what I liked about AgentMatch was at least the promise of editorial neutrality. Unlike Trulia or Zillow’s pay-to-play advertising model, which as a consumer I’d typically disregard. In theory, the algorithm should surface the best agent for my needs.

What I would like to see however, is greater detail and transparency on how the AgentMatch suggestion is generated. Currently – there’s really no explanation provided as to why the agents that are presented are suggested. And that’s the biggest shame really.

No sense telling me the who without telling me the why.

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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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Augmented Reality (AR) is definitely one of the hot new mobile technologies right now. Augmented reality, simply put, is the layering of data on top of the visual output from a smartphone’s camera. This has big implications for all kinds of local search tools, but particularly in real estate.

Layar is a European company that has developed a platform that helps developers customize and build these data layers (see Layar MARS Browser Supplements Reality on Sellsius blog).

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPHDMVxKn0[/youtube]

Called their Reality Browser, it has already been used by French company MeilleurAgents.com to create a layer that displays realtime property valuations in Paris (see Augmented Reality Real Estate Valuations).

The big news this week however, is that Layar is now available in the iTunes Store (Download Link) for the iPhone 3GS handset; which will potentially take this application to a huge new market.

As consumer awareness grows of AR, I’ll bet we’ll see many more innovative uses of this technology in the months to come.

In fact, an article in the latest issue of Fast Company reports that Trulia has already developed a layer for Layar’s Reality browser. The app will “overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Scan a neighborhood’s available properties and even connect with the realtors.” (emphasis added)

Coming soon to an iPhone near you?

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PhotoSketch is a mind-blowing project from a group of computer science students in China, who have created software that will take your hand drawn sketch, search the web for corresponding images and then stitch them all together into a brand new composite image.

A video demonstration from their paper shows the software in action.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/6496886[/vimeo]

While only tangentially related to real estate marketing (though imagine the fun you putting together a listing presentation…) – what I think this technology points to is a rise of alternate input methods that will push us beyond the keyboard. The iPhone has already demonstrated the appeal of multi-touch and I suspect we’ll be seeing even more creative uses of this kind of gesture-based interaction over the next few years.

Text based search has been held back somewhat by a limited vocabulary and clumsy filters. So imagine searching for a home by simply drawing what you were looking for on Surface-like table or a Perceptive Pixel-type wall and have the software return the most relevant results to you.

It won’t be for everyone – but for the more adventurous, the future of real estate search may just be about letting your fingers do the talking.

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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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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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It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything coming out of the Googleplex around its moves in the real estate space.

And now, we wait no longer. On the Google LatLong blog today, Google announced that they have rolled out vast improvements in the way that they display real estate searches in their index; they are now included by default in the Maps view.

They have also rolled out brand new real estate specific landing page at maps.google.com/realestate.

We want to keep making it easier for people find the real estate information they’re looking for and have it returned to them in a useful way. So, from today, if you enter a query like san francisco real estate on Google Maps, you’ll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify “real estate” from the search options menu, but now we’re making it easier to find available listings.

This move should come as no surprise to anyone following this space. Real estate search tools like Zillow and Trulia are seeing significant traffic growth and Google will only stay on the sidelines so long once they see someone else starting to monetize search results.

They also seem to have borrowed some of the features (transit search) that made some of their competitors, like Estately, so compelling.

You’ll notice that we’ve made some other enhancements that will improve your real estate searching experience. We’ve added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.

This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a BART stop. You can also pan the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is more your speed.

Google has silently been collecting broker feeds for the last couple of years (pulling them in to their Google Base database). And so like many of its counterparts it has a reasonably deep market coverage, but it does depend on what part of the country you’re searching.

As mentioned up front, right now Google is only deploying these searches into its Maps results, so they are relatively confined. But I wonder how long before they display them in their Web results too (much like they do with their Local Business results – at the top of the organic results). If that’s the case, here’s where we may see the Mountain View giant start to siphon off traffic from the real estate specific search sites.

Time will tell, but the game’s about to get interesting.

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Location awareness is one of the killer features in the new iPhone. Especially in real estate apps, like Zillow’s app, which recently broke ½ million downloads.

We all know the old axiom with property, right? Location, location, location.

Now that can be translated to your desktop, in addition to your phone. The new version of Firefox (3.5) has added location awareness as one of the new features in this release. From their website:

Now Firefox can tell websites where you’re located so you can find info that’s more relevant and more useful (for example, getting directions or finding restaurants near you). It’s all optional – Firefox doesn’t share your location without your permission – and is done with the utmost respect for your privacy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5Zbc-Rg6e8[/youtube]

The is potentially huge for online real estate sites, which in the near future could query their visitors, ask for their location and return the most relevant results quickly and seamlessly to their desktop.

Granted if you are searching from home, you (hopefully) already know where you are. But if you were house hunting in a city in an unfamiliar State or pulling out a 3G-enabled netbook in a coffee shop on a Sunday morning open house tour, this could be a killer feature.

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

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