by danihernanz

RealTyger is the new product from the minds at RealEspace (see RealEspace Launching Soon), led by Jeff Corbett, The XBroker. Both will be launching next week at Real Estate Connect.

So what is it? In a recent blog post, Jeff reveals it is:

An exclusive online real estate community, or social network, by Professionals for Consumers.

Sounds an awful lot like ActiveRain…

RealEspace itself however, turns out to be a suite of tools and ‘dashboard’ package that will help real estate professionals manage all aspects of their web presence, Jeff gives us a sneak peak today of their “blog-site publishing platform and backend office manager”. Some of the features include:

• Post Editor
• Spread Sheets
• Email
• Feed Reader
• RateSpeed Mortgage Search Engine
• Video Listing Suite
• Listing Manager
• Listing Map Mash-Up with Multiple Layers of Information
• All SEO, all the time…

Definitely an intriguing product mix. It seems RealEspace and RealTyger are lining up themselves up to be the single destination for web-bound real estate practitioners.

RealEspace is heading squarely into a very crowded marketplace; Point2NLS, Incredible Agent and VREO (among many) already do much of what is being promised.

That said, few of these vendors tie it all up nicely into a single experience for an agent and if RealTyger and RealEspace perform as hoped, then they stand a chance of cornering a good chunk of the market.

Only a week to go till we see the whole package. Until then, we’ll see about getting some Beta invites for FOREM readers. Throw your name down in the comments, if you’re interested.

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Shackprices, the Seattle based real estate search site, has relaunched itself under a new banner, now calling itself Estately (a much more dignified name, if you ask me). John Cook reports that the name change was prompted by a desire “to move away from the word ’shack’.”

The company, which is a licensed broker with the NWMLS, has been in business for just under a year and is led by Galen Ward, a blogger at Rain City Guide.

Shackprices had always had one of the more innovative map-based search tools (see ShackPrices Makes For Fast Home Searching) and Estately continues that tradition. It seems that the smaller brokers often are able to pioneer these kinds of technological advances. Blueroof.com and Movoto also come to mind.

Estately has no plans to get involved in the buying and selling of real estate (at least not yet) and is using its MLS affiliation to gain access to the IDX feeds to populate its listing database.

Launched in tandem with the rebranding, Estately has also launched an Agent Match function which hopes to pair real estate buyers with agents. A pay-for-leads based model is not surprising, though ambitious. HouseValues and HomeGain are already heavily committed in this space.

Estately promises to do it a little differently however. Agents are all prescreened by Estately and buyers can view ratings on every agent (see The Search for Perfect Agent). Buyers can identify their needs and agents can bid for their business (much like BuyerHunt). Ultimately, unlike HouseValues and HomeGain, the final decision remains with the buyer to choose the agent they want to work with. Estately gets paid a percentage of the commission for the referral.

It remains to be seen whether Estately can truly make a go with this model. Many companies have tried and failed before them. Barring that, its options are pursuing an advertising model or alternatively, it could license its technology to other brokers nationwide looking to give their web sites a facelift.

I suspect the later will ultimately be the best course for them, but in the interim, I’m rooting for them to pull it off.

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HotPads.com, the apartment and rental home search engine and one of the founding members of Real Estate 2.0, had been awfully quiet lately. (For more, read Renters Arm Themselves With Info)

This week however they burst back on the scene with a brand new features, new maps , new imagery and more importantly – $2.3 million dollars in VC financing.

On the surface, the site has not changed all that much and the interface is still a little too cartoony for my tastes. The icons, while visually interesting (they bounce!), consume way too much screen real estate on a map search and make the search experience a little clumsy in my opinion.

Anyway, here’s a full list of the new features from their press release:

• New HotPads Maps
• Microsoft Satellite Mapping Integration
• Neighborhood and City Demographic and Housing Stats with Wikipedia
• Articles
• Political Party Affiliation Mapping
• Demographic and Housing Heat Maps
• Points of Interest Mapping including Schools, Universities and Public
• Transportation

What is most interesting to me out of this list are the heat maps, which you can now layer over a search and show datasets like population density, per capita income and median rent. Clicking on any of these adds Neighboroo-like color coding of the data to any map view.

Drilling down to a particular apartment takes you to an expanded property view which gives you a couple of slick features; a dynamic slide show of photos (should any exist) and the ability to tag the listing to del.icio.us and even share it on Facebook – a feature I’m think more of the real estate search engines should adopt. (Unfortunately the Facebook feature did not work for me exactly as I had hoped – it posted a generic Hotpads promo to my profile rather than details on the rental itself.)

Onto the bigger picture however, and what this announcement signals to me is that Spring not only means a new home buying season, but a renewed push for new financing by the Real Estate 2.0 front runners. They’ve all now seen a couple of full business cycles and are probably sucking on the fumes of their angel rounds.

They’re also heading into tougher market environment these days and probably need to top up their bank accounts; so Redfin is out beating on doors and Trulia may be next. Pretty much the only guy smiling is Zillow who is still sitting pretty on top of a mountain of cash.

More on HotPads new deal from Screenwerk.

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The Toronto Real Estate Blog announced Canada’s first map-based real estate search engine today. RealEstatePlus.ca aims to do to the Canadian market what Trulia has done in the US and Extate and Nestoria et al. have done in the U.K. Currently, it’s only available in Toronto however.

The site is nice enough on the eyes and is bathed in the now all-to-familiar pastel hues of Web 2.0. Overall, the design is inoffensive but uninspired, and largely feels kind of flat. But this should be easy enough to tweak in subsequent versions.

Functionally, the site is good first release.

Searches are conducted by neighborhood (for more on neighborhood search, see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) – though the experience of navigating down to the right neighborhood was a little clumsy. I think this was largely due to the small lag time that exists in displaying a hoverbox in Virtual Earth. You have to roll over the icon, wait for the popup and then click where you want to go. Slow and annoying.

Add to that, clicking on ‘View Listings’ takes you to a hierarchical list of properties rather than the map view that I was expecting. To get to the map view, you actually need to click on the ‘View Demographics” link – which struck me as a little unintuitive.

Once in a neighborhood (e.g., Summerhill) however, RealEstatePlus does a good job of outlining basic demographics as well as show you the properties for sale. They also do a nice job of layering in neighborhood specific information; like hospitals, police stations, schools, parks etc. – it reminded me a lot of Coldwell Banker’s implementation (see Big Brokers Going Local) of neighborhood specific information.

Clicking on a property listing (e.g., 52 Walker Ave) gives you most of what you’d expect. There’s a nifty dynamic slideshow of the property photos and the site cross-sells similar properties to the one you’re looking at. It’s not clear whether the listings are scraped from the Internet or pulled through some relationship with the local MLS.

It’s also not clear what the company’s revenue model is (other than Google Ads) though I imagine, just like its US and U.K. counterparts, that will evolve over time as well.

Looking even further North: Renthusiast reports Norway’s mashup Igglo now covers Olso

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HomeGain launched a brand new automated valuation tool last week, it’s calling its Instant Home Valuation Tool. According to their press release, it’s “the descendant of the original instant Home Valuation Tool that HomeGain created over seven years ago.”

I’m not sure what the old Instant Home Valuation Tool did, but the new one is a fairly decent effort. Biggest plus, it returns your result very quickly. The database is positively snappy, making for a nice experience.

Overall however, I find the overall design kind of uninsipired (not a big fan of the red and green) and I can’t help but think the value range it returns (rather than a number) is kind of a cop out. A $40,000 or $50,000 spread doesn’t do me a whole lot of good if I’m really trying to assess the value of my house as an asset.

Of course the business model is it’s offering agents the opportunity to buy advertising on the site and be the exclusive ‘featured’ agent around the results – and presumably the recipient of all the leads, should any materialize.

But the real question is, is this too little, too late?

Zillow has all but wrapped up the home valuation games in the mind of the consumer – to Zillow your home is almost the same as FedEx’ng a package or Xeroxing an article (admittedly, the latter expression has fallen out of favor a bit of late).

Cyberhomes, Fidelity’s AVM tool, runs a close second. I had a chance to get a sneak peak at what the site is planning to do, at the C.A.R. meeting last week – and count me among the new believers. (A far cry from my initial review; see Cyberhomes AVM is a Total Joke).

I think Cyberhomes is poised for big things and I hope to write more about their product in the near future, but for the time being, if you’re interested in learning more about their strategy, I’d recommend reading Transparent Real Estate’s excellent series on the service.

The only other guy on the block, eppraisal.com has an interesting approach, but I haven’t seen it gain much traction in terms of consumer traffic (see Alexa traffic graph below) – also, it kept giving me error messages when I punched in my home address… not good.

HouseValues? Well, let’s not even get started on that dead model.

So, HomeGain getting into the game – does it mean anything? Well looking at the Alexa chart they still have a solid traffic ranking and it is certainly a more compelling feature than some of their other products (finding a Realtor, or clicking through to some random agent’s website) – but I doubt they’ll find much a niche trying to reposition themselves as a serious AVM site.

I think HomeGain is a little late to the party with this offering. What it may do is help keep some of their existing visitors hanging around just a little bit longer, but as far as getting new bodies I think they face a serious uphill slog.

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