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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Speaking of polls… Check out the results of the Zillow poll on sellsius° real estate blog.

They tend to show not much trust in Zillow’s Zestimates (75% of buyers and sellers say they don’t trust Zillow), but I’d put this down to the sellsius° readership (and potential pool of respondents) being heavily weighted from those in the Real Estate community.

I think the general population, at large, has a much greater tolerance for the Zillow numbers.

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