Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the guys over at Incredible Agent launched their latest venture today. Homehugg hopes to be to property listings what Digg.com was to technology news.

The premise behind the site is Realtors can submit their listings to the site, and like other social bookmarking sites, if the community likes the property they can choose to “Hugg” it. Presumably the properties with the most Huggs will float to the surface. Consumers can surf through these properties on the Homehugg homepage.

I like the site (though I’m not crazy about the pink color scheme), if for no other reason than it offers a free and easy way for Realtors to generate new eyeballs on a property. They could even possibly use it to vet listing descriptions (perhaps even the pricing) against the community desires, i.e., tweaking the text to see if results in new Huggs. Homehugg also makes it easy for Realtors to add HomeHugg buttons to their websites.

For consumers however, the options are a little more limited. Right now, Hugging a Home is a little cumbersome. I’d love to see a bookmarklet that could speed up the submission process, so as I’m surfing homes I could quickly add them to HomeHugg like I can with del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

Also, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an RSS feed for “Hugged” homes. It would be nice to subscribe to a feed of homes from a particular city or state.

Hopefully we’ll see some of these changes as the site comes out of Beta.

More coverage: Home Love at HomeHugg at sellsius° real estate blog

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Ask City launches to take on Windows Live Local, Google Local and Yahoo Local. At first glance, it looks like a solid, competitive offering. I particularly like the ability to take a snapshot (bookmark) of your searches and save them for future use.

Ask City incorporates features from a number of third-party sources but, most interestingly for real estate readers, from Yelp, Judy’s Book and CitySearch. These sources power Ask City’s ratings for each listing it returns. Here’s a listing of Agents & Brokers in my zip code, as an example.

Regular readers will know, I’ve been harping on the growing importance of online reputation management (e.g. Rapleaf’s Real World Feedback System) for a while now. I think Ask’s new product aptly demonstrates this point as it is pushing these rankings/ratings deeper into the mainstream. Agents and brokers are going to have to be aware of the need to monitor their rankings on these search sites as I think they are going to increasingly become important lead generators.

Trulia adds Google Earth (kml) feeds to its search results bringing my dream of conducting a Virtual World real estate search one step closer.

Carnival of Real Estate is up at the Property Monger.

Real Estate Bookmarks is a del.icio.us clone designed specifically for sharing real estate-related bookmarks. Their database seems to be mainly populated with agent sites, though it does seem to work easily enough. I created an account and added my site with little trouble. Honestly, I can’t see the point though, as del.icio.us works just fine for me right now.

Speaking of del.icio.us, you can see my bookmarks on del.icio.us here. I’ve also been trying to get the del.icio.us “thingy” to automatically post my daily links to this blog – but with little success. If any of you can figure it out, let me know.

Finally, if you have an article, blog post or specific tidbit you’d like to share with me, tag it with the ‘tforem’ tag to del.icio.us and I’ll be sure to read it.

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