Terabitz has been very quiet lately.

A refresher for those of you might not have heard of the company – they launched in 2007 to much fanfare (see Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data) — as a sort of “Netvibes for real estate” — but the company made hard tack to starboard in the years since and have reinvented themselves as a platform for real estate brokerages.

It’s a crowded marketplace in that space, but certainly one that is always ripe for innovation. This week they’ve pulled the up the curtain on what they’ve been up too, with a new release of their platform.

It includes a number of back-end features that build off their data aggregation chops to allow brokers to create content rich web sites. From their press release:

Neighborhood and Community pages featuring business reviews, photos and school reports (via implementation of the Yelp, Flickr, and Education.com APIs) as well as hyperlocal news content (via implementation of Yahoo Pipes).

Real estate market reports featuring data and trends derived from live MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data and displayed in a way the average user can understand at a glance. Market reports are provided at the neighborhood and community level, which makes them far more useful than typical city or county-level views.

Property search that better merchandizes listings through a “gallery” view that enables the user to view large photos in the search results display.

Explore the Neighborhood™, a map-based tool that enables users to view amenities in the area of their home search – businesses, places of worship, recreational facilities and more – in order to better understand what it is like to live in a place.

Terabitz One-to-One™, a prospecting tool that enables agents to create dedicated, automatically updating Websites for homeowners that display recent sales, new listings and a dynamic home value estimate.

The Terabitz platform is modeled on the relaunch of Chicago brokerage @properties‘ web site. @properties is a company that’s proved its willing to invest in potentially game-changing ideas (see Real Estate Search Stores – Coming Soon?) so it seems like a natural fit.

The redesign is clean, simple and well executed. But I’m not a fan of having to register in order to search for a home — so I didn’t get a chance to test out the search tool. And it was doubly annoying that every listing I clicked on I had to create an account… how about a couple freebies guys?

Nevertheless, I did like Terabitz platform’s neighborhood and community pages (like this one for Lincoln Park, for example) which were a nice collection of a series of different data sources. My only suggestion would be to add more media; more photos (the Flickr stream pulls in some pretty random stuff) – professionally produced neighborhood videos would be a fantastic addition to those pages too.

In any case, it seems this release is why we hadn’t heard much from Terabitz recently. It turns out they’ve had their heads down coding.

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I really dig this. New York based broker Halstead Property partnered with New York Magazine to provide its online reviews to the real estate company’s web site.

Check out their neighborhood profiles for Soho or Greenwich Village, for example. Great information that’s very valuable to the consumer. I think this brilliant move for Halstead and it’s an interesting trend for a few reasons.

First, it seems that brokers are increasingly interested in aligning themselves with established publications to bring a degree of authenticity and consumer name-brand recognition to their destination sites. Case in point – Realogy is in the midsts of rebuilding an entire real estate company around the Better Homes and Gardens brand. Why do this? Quite simply, because these brands resonate with consumers.

The reality is that, to many, there is still some cachet to “dead tree
media” – and the brokers may be waking up to that. These sorts of deals
are a natural differentiator in any market.

It also signals to me that more brokers are waking to the reality that they themselves are media publishers and therefore need to start acting like them. Inking content deals for their sites is part of that, but so is exploring trends like syndication and distribution for their own content (i.e. listings).

Secondly, it’s a brand new revenue stream for local media publishers. With the real estate brokers, they have found new customers who are hungry for neighborhood content to add to the on-site experience for their web visitors. I fully expect to see many more examples of this in the future, as media look to mine their archives for syndication opportunities as their advertising revenue scales back; Portland Monthly magazine could decide to license its Best Neighborhoods reports (PDF) to a Portland broker, for example.

It’ll be interesting to see where this all goes.

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Avvo is a new site that just launched to try and take the guess work out of finding a lawyer. The premise of the service really struck a chord with me.

Why is there no such service for real estate?

As a someone who’s getting ready to buy a house, I find it interesting that there is no clear way to go and get find a real estate professional online and be able to judge their competency – before picking up the phone.

Sure, sites like IncredibleAgents.com and HomeThinking.com (for more on HomeThinking read Real Estate 2.0 Market Leader: Homethinking.com) try to do this, but truthfully, I’ve found their search criteria limited, their rankings woefully inadequate (4 or 5 stars doesn’t tell me much) and their databases largely incomplete (at least in Oregon, anyway).

I guess it begs the question then, is it even possible in an industry that sees as much turnover as real estate, to create a comprehensive database of agents and come up with a fair rating algorithm?

Avvo, by way of example, allows you to search by practice area and assigns each individual in their database a proprietary, unbiased Avvo rating. In addition, you can read their complete disciplinary sanction history as well as user-generate ratings and review from past clients.

Surely, in this industry, there should be a similar way to filter an agent search somewhere based on their specialty (condos, or luxury homes, for instance) or length of time in the industry (I want a seasoned vet or young go-getter) or last year’s production, for example.

On the flip side however, as a Realtor or real estate professional – how do you grapple with an online landscape where everyone can now be a critic? I find the issue of online identity utterly fascinating (see How Do You Measure Your Reputation?) and have written about this issue before (see The Rise of the User Review).

But the crux of the issue is this; one negative review on a site like Avvo could sink your entire practice, and if you weren’t listening – you’d be none the wiser.

I had a chance to talk with the guys from MerchantCircle.com again today (see my initial review at MerchantCircle Launches Social Networking for Business) and they’ve since released a whole slew of tools that help small business owners (including Realtors) get a handle on their web presence.

One of the tools I found particularly useful, was their Reputation Management system which aggregates and tracks your profiles on a number of sites (Yelp, Yahoo Local, CitySearch etc.) and informs you when a new rating has been posted about you or your business.

In this day and age, definitely a useful resource.

[Aside: I am working with Charles Turner of the Portland Real Estate Blog, with whom I am very happy - this post is more a general musing.]

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Trulia launched a pretty significant new release of its real estate search site this morning.

Big news was they finally removed the Beta from their logo, hopefully spurring many of its Web 2.0 cousins to do the same.

More importantly however, it has charged right into what’s rapidly becoming a very crowded space – the online conversations around real estate.

Zillow is trying to own the conversation about your home (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?). my-currency is trying to own the conversation around housing prices (see My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds) and YourStreet.com is trying to own the conversation around your local market (see Real Estate Geeks Unite at YourStreet.com) – just to name a few of the competitors.

Trulia’s new offering, Trulia Voices, allows anyone to ask a question about a particular neighborhood or Zip code and get an answer. The idea is that real estate agents can “own” a particular neighborhood or and establish themselves as the “neighborhood expert” – a strategy that I’ve written about many times before on this blog (see Everybody’s Going Local).

It’s a strategy echoed in ActiveRain’s Localism and could even be the basis of Move.com’s $6 million stealth project – though I see a much greater draw of consumers to Trulia’s offering. Trulia holds the “holy grail” for real estate shoppers online and has one of the best search interfaces out there – one that is aped by many.

They’ve made a concerted effort to attract Realtors – by making it easy to answer questions (you can subscribe to email alerts with new request from a neighborhood) and there’s even a Top Voices leaderboard in each city which is bound to stoke Realtor’s competitive fires.

Trulia Voices is the final piece of the puzzle for the scrappy search engine. They’ve wooed the brokers and won and now they wooing the agents. With this in place, they’re set for an even bigger push towards mainstream consumers – I’d expect to see this happen later this year.

And once they’ve gathered together the holy trinity of Real Estate 2.0; brokers, agents, consumers – they’ll be very well positioned. Either to forge ahead on their own or as a very juicy acquisition target indeed.

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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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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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My post on HomeGain (see HomeGain is AVM Also-Ran) stirred up some discussion – here is a recent email thread I had with Louis Cammarosano, HomeGain’s General Manager (which he graciously allowed me to reprint here):

Here is why we consistently rank ahead the media darling Zillow in terms of traffic and certainly in revenue- HG has ALL types of listings- new homes, MLS, foreclosure, agent listings -zillow has very few listings

Homescout.com our wholly owned listings site itself has over one million listings

- HG has instant free hval tool (the first original HVAL tool from seven years ago) and we give our visitors the opportunity to connect with a Realtor to get a free professional HVAL

- HG has an agent evaluator offering that allows consumers to compare Realtors anonymously – Agent evaluator.com, another one of our sites, according to Hitwise is also one of the fastest growing real estate sites.

- HG features a mortgage center and a moving center – Realtor.com doesn’t have one nor does zillow

We have over 300 partnerships driving traffic including Yahoo and USA Today and 170 of our owner CV’s online newspaper sites

HomeGain just turned eight years old and its taken us eight years to build up the partnerships, determine the best sources of leads and traffic and to build up an agent base in the thousands.

Homegain is profitable.

Agree or disagree?

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Redfin has unveiled a new version of it’s site tonight, that includes a total redesign of the entire site, a new color scheme and a brand new logo.

Aping UK search engine Extate’s recent redesign (see Extate Cranks Up the Heat), among other things it has gotten rid of the property balloons (something Redfin developer Matt Goyer alluded to recently) and sports a much larger map and simpler navigation. In my opinion, they’ve hit a home run in terms of usability with this version.

But while I love the new site, I’m not such a fan of the new logo. The change, according to Redfin, was “to avoid litigation threatened by Move.com, which holds a registered trademark over a symbol that, similar to the original Redfin logo, included a house within a circle.”

(One can’t help but wonder if Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman’s sparring with Alan Dalton at January’s Connect Conference in New York may have indirectly contributed to this action.)

The new logo combines an image of a person, a house and a fruit-tree – which strikes me as kind of weak and a bit incongruous. What picking fruit has to do with a company named after a perch, I’m not sure. But it sounds like they didn’t have much option… and at least they’re carrying on a proud tradition (see Why Do All Real Estate Logos Suck So Bad?).

In conjunction with the new site, the company also announced it has gone live in Boston, its fourth metropolitan market and its first on the East Coast. This solves the mystery of why Kelman was hanging out in Boston with the guys from Condo Blog.

Redfin now covers Essex, Norfolk, Middlesex and Suffolk counties, and include the cities of Cambridge, Concord, Lowell, Newton, Marlborough and Stoughton. The launch adds over 20,000 new listings to its search engine.

Update: Watch Redfin Marketing Director Eric Heller describe some of the changes to the site:

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The US based realty search engines (Trulia, and to a lesser degree, Redfin) are quickly getting lapped by their European counterparts.

Seems like coming out of the gates, nearly all of the Brits aped Trulia’s ground breaking search interface – but have quickly pushed that aside as they race to add new features (see Extate Launches Video Tours). Now it’s Trulia’s interface that is starting to look at bit dated.

extate, who are competing against the likes of Nestoria, Zoomf (see Zoomf Aims to Help British Home Buyers) and OnOneMap (see OnOneMap Gives You More), faces the cutthroat reality that in a field crowded with competition, they must innovate or die.

That same lack of competition here may mean the reigning kings of the Real Estate 2.0 search game grow complacent (as was the case with Realtor.com before them) – but also means there’s a huge opportunity for new players to come into the game.

A couple of new features extate has developed recently; that US based real estate search engines should perhaps take note of…

• No more balloon popups. Means the map doesn’t readjust when you select the markers – which I love. Maps jumping all over the place when I’m trying to click on a property. The property information displays the full details in the sidebar which is also nice.
• Markers change color once you’ve viewed them – a simple yet extremely useful innovation which answers one of the most basic questions a real estate shopper might have; “What freakin’ properties have I already seen here?”

More excitingly, The Heat is On. As I’ve said before, “any data set can be made visually sexier with a heatmap” (Heat Maps Catch on Fire) and Trulia does a nice job of layering heat maps onto city level search as a way to see market activity (e.g. Portland Home Prices and Heat Map).

But extate has taken it one step further and added a fourth tab to the Google map that along with Satellite and Hybrid imagery provide heat maps of local prices per square foot (their implementation recalls the visually stunning GeoIQ mashups). This is a great feature that coupled with more specific local information, could be adopted by many of the big brokers too (see Big Brokers Going Local).

All of these advances however, mean very little without a clear monetization strategy – which is one area that Trulia (and again, to a lesser degree, Redfin) have focused much more of their energies to date. That said, it’d be nice to see some of this innovation trickle over to this side of the pond one of these days.

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Owning the conversation around real estate seems to be a big trend these days. Zillow’s trying to do it with their new release (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?) and now there’s another competitor on the block, so to speak.

YourStreet.com went live this morning. It’s a site for real estate geeks (of whom I proudly count myself one) to get together and talk about what’s happening in their city. The site covers Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle right now and soon will be adding Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego into the mix. They hope to be covering the top 50 metro areas in the country by the end of the year. (Hopefully Portland gets in there).

The site was started by a group of CNET veterans and was demo’d at the SFBeta mixer last month; Rafe Needleman mentioned it briefly in his recent post Start-ups in the city. YourStreet uses a bunch of ’social’ features to try and aggregate the local neighborhood knowledge of local residents. Local news articles, forums, blog posts and neighborhood wikis all add to the conversation. Flickr photo feeds from each city liven up the page as well.

Much like mycurrency.com (see My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds) is trying to do, YourStreet.com is also hoping to tap into the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to track neighborhood real estate markets. The idea is the people on the ground have an intuitive sense of what’s happening in their neighborhood, so users vote on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether it’s a hot or cool market. The votes are tallied and presented in a color coded graph. Votes are tied to a user’s profile and people can choose to agree or disagree with that opinion, which effectively polices the ratings – I suspect that the more people disagree with a particular ranking, that vote would drop out of the calculation.

I think this is probably the most compelling aspect of YourStreet. It allows anyone to quickly add their voice to the mix in a really fast and easy way. I bet this becomes one of the most popular features on the site. How accurate the Market Monitors actually become is another question altogether.

Real estate professionals are invited to become part of the site and even promote themselves (adding a link to your user profile) as long as you follow the guidelines established in their Good Neighbor Policy.

No sense of how they plan on monetizing the site – not even the ubiquitous Google Ads right now. I think with a few more smart content partnerships (Turnhere’s neighborhood videos for example, or Trulia’s neighborhood data) this site could take on the big Z and turn into a great consumer neighborhood resource.

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