Ten of my favorite real estate search experiences on line today.

Regional Brokers

BlueRoof

Movoto

Sawbuck Realty

Webdigs

Big Brands

John L Scott

Windermere Property Point

National Brokers

Redfin

Regional

Estately.com

HawaiiLife

International

Century 21 Canada Real Estate

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by bocavermelha-l.b.

Sharing photos is an incredibly popular activity and the Web that has spawned numerous awkwardly named web sites to help you do just; Flickr, Zoomr, Fotki, just to name a few.

Real estate photography is an art unto itself however – Kris Berg can show you how to do it right (see Some Homes Just Scream Shoot Me). Athol Kay, on the other hand, shows you how it can go wrong… oh, so wrong (see Bad MLS Photo of the Day).

But getting the right shot is only half the challenge. Recently, I was putting together a gallery for some of my photos and was looking for interesting ways to present them on my personal web site. I did some digging around online and found some great free, open source Flash galleries that anyone with a rudimentary amount of knowledge of Web programming can begin customize.

(For more on adding a simple Flash slideshow to your site, read Splash Some Flash On Your Site)

If you are feeling a little creative, each of these galleries could easily be adapted to show-off property photos on a single property web site or create a gallery of current listings, or “recently solds” for your business site.

Most of these scripts load images and image titles dynamically from an external XML file – just tell the script where your photos are located (presuming you’ve already FTP’d them up to your server) and it with generate the final product on the fly.

1. Polaroid Gallery puts on your photos on the table. Literally. This script will even load images dynamically from your Flickr feed. It the creates a table full of Polaroids that you can sort through and move around using your mouse. Check out a full screen example.
2. Flash Carousel slideshow was created by Saverio Caminiti – it creates a carousel like effect that you can control the spin and pitch with your mouse. It even resizes dynamically – check out the Flowers example.
3. PostcardViewer – It outputs a series of photos that looks like a set of postcards shuffled on a surface. You can navigate through them using your arrow keys or mouse. See PostcardViewer Demo.
4. AutoViewer – Very similar to PostcardViewer, AutoViewer outputs a linear sequence of images. You can add captions to each of the individual photos. See AutoViewer Demo.
5. SimpleViewer – If you’re looking for a more fully featured gallery that will show a thumbnail and high-rez sample – SimpleViewer is a very popular application that will generate a gallery with a customizable interface (color, positions etc. can all be modified) on the fly for you. See SimpleViewer Demo.

Bonus – For Windows users who use Google’s Picasa to manage their photos. PhotoFlip Gallery is a template for Picasa that lets you create an online photo book (complete with the sound of turning pages). Check out a Demo.

Mac users should check out iLife 08’s .Mac Web Gallery – which has some very nice looking templates, though it does require a .Mac account to use.

Finally, if you’re looking to drop just a little bit of coin, you can get some really slick looking applications for your site.

1. SlideShowPro – extremely robust gallery Flash component with loads of additional features you can tweak to your liking – even plays videos. Requires a full version of Adobe’s Flash MX or Flash CS3. 29 bucks.
2. PhotoFlow by Flashloaded – create a knock-off of Apple’s CoverFlow effect. See demo. $59.95.
   • Also, check out this tutorial to see how you can use this script to create an AppleTV Style photo wall. See demo.

So if you’ve got the shots, show ‘em off!

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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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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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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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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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OK, so you’ve found the home of your dreams on Trulia or you’ve successfully “Made Someone Move“. What comes next?

TotalMove might just be what you’re looking for. They aim to help homeowners prepare for the huge transition that moving entails.

At it’s core, TotalMove is a mashup of a number of different web properties; listings from oodle, agents from Homegain, neighborhood profiles from Turnhere, etc.

The site’s goal is to give consumers the same level of service corporate executives enjoy through professional relocation services. They provide a step-by-step approach to deal with all the small headaches that come with buying a new home; finding an agent to represent you, getting financing, arranging for movers, transferring utilities, that sort of thing.

But more than just giving consumers timely information and reams of checklists, TotalMove also provides free personal assistance from a call center staffed with full-time real estate coordinators. They promise their coordinators will act as personal moving concierges who can help guide you along at any stage of the process.

It’s this kind of melding of online/offline services that I believe consumers are looking for. People want information and data – but I think many still would like someone to hold their hand when it comes down to getting it done.

TotalMove’s revenue model is advertising based, and they also earn referrals from each of the vendors. This allows them to provide this service gratis to folks like you and me.

They also will private label the service for others, which make it a option for brokers looking to offer this service to all their clients.

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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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This has been reported elsewhere, but I thought I should update any readers who may have missed it.

Thanks to some sleuthing from Kevin at 3 Oceans Real Estate Blog, Redfin released a correction to its controversial claim that Redfin agents more effective negotiator. Apparently they were off by just a hair in their calculations.

More from John Cook: Redfin admits mistake

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Trulia announced today that it has inked a deal with Realogy Corporation (H), parent company of Century 21, Coldwell Banker and ERA, to upload more than 500,000 of its affiliates’ listings to its database. Realogy made this move to Trulia alongside a similar deal with Google Base.

Realogy putting its listing inventory online only makes sense and it’s heavyweight presence is further vindication of a broad distribution strategy. Trulia, especially, must be feeling elated with a big win like this – perfect timing too, hot on the heals of its deal with Keller Williams.

Not sure if the deal with Realogy includes branded listings like KW deal, but if it does that’d be a huge boost to Trulia’s bottom line.

We may just have seen a tipping point here; as smaller brokers, who may have hung back, race to embrace both of these platforms to keep up with the Jones’.

As they do, as Jim Duncan points out, how much longer till the local MLS databases don’t much matter anymore?

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