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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For the last few months we’ve seen a flurry of activity in the real estate space, as Real Estate 2.0 companies line up to take advantage of the iPhone.

The latest company to dive in (after Realtor.com and Trulia, see Trulia Launches iPhone Version) is Terabitz. Today they’ve launched a tool where they build a portable MLS search tool for brokers (presumably tapping into their IDX feeds) who want to build a iPhone ready version of their web site.

In some ways, it’s Roost’s business model brought to the handset.

And frankly I’m a little surprised they got scooped like that. It only seems natural that mobile search will be the next evolution of real estate search – being tied to desktop seems at odds with the mobile nature of a real world hunt for a home (see House Hunting On The Go).

Ultimately, the killer app here will be one that bridges both worlds. One where I can start my search on line, send it to my phone, plot a route to take me round the neighborhoods, rate the properties while on the road (good/bad) and have it sync back to my desktop on my return for follow up.

We’re not there yet, but I suspect it won’t be long. I think once we see native apps on the iPhone (see Apple Announces iPhone 2.0 Software Beta), we’ll start seeing this as a very real possibility.

Now admittedly, the iPhone is still largely reserved for bleeding edge users (the price tag alone precludes a lot of people from buying one – though my wife definitely has her eyes on mine, as soon as the 3G version is released, she’s claimed it). But Apple’s innovation will surely trickle down.

Just like the iPhone’s radical touch interface changed the way we interact with our phones; I’m guessing the platform will soon radically change the way we search for real estate.

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My interview with Ashfaq Munshi of Terabitz from earlier this summer at Connect SF.

We’ll be shooting InmanTV at the upcoming NAR Conference and Expo in Las Vegas on November 14/15 and are looking for interview subjects. If you’re a vendor with an interesting product, someone who’s doing something cool with online real estate or a Realtor with an unique perspective who’s interested in being on camera, email me with your angle and contact information to joel [at] inman.com

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Terabitz, the controversial real estate startup that was accused of data scraping shortly after its launch (see Terabitz addresses data-scraping concerns), has just launched a Make-Your-Own-Mashup side to their site.

Previously, the company let users pull together a number of different data sources in to create a personalized real estate dashboard (see Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data), making it the NetVibes or PageFlakes of real estate.

Now with its new map tab, Terabitz wants you to leverage its data aggregation tools and create your own Google Maps mashup. You can layer as many types of data as you want on top of it; Craiglist listings, MLS listings, FSBOs and Foreclosures, for example. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping icons on to the map.

Here’s a link to a map that I made for Portland Real Estate.

Right now you can share your creation via hyperlink or email, Techcrunch is reporting that later today you will be able to embed the map into your web site. Unfortunately that function was not available when I tested it.

On paper, this new feature is a natural extension of Terabitz’s platform and follows the growing trend for web sites to widgetize their offerings. The question is, who exactly is the audience for this type of tool? Presumably real estate agents looking to add another interactive element to their web sites. But something tells me they’re not looking to layer in FSBOs on top of their listings.

And, if they already have a web site with listings, I suspect they’re pulling a full inventory from an established IDX vendor anyway.

More than lack of audience, the real problem with most real estate widgets these days is that most are crying out for context and color. Listing data alone is dry and boring. Successful widgets should offer real value to the end user, and are more than just branding opportunities for the originating source.

Widgets like those from Altos Research, which can give real time market context in the form of visual graphs.

Or Google’s My Maps, which allows you to exercise your creativity and add the necessary color commentary that your visitors are looking for. Kris and Steve Berg from San Diego Castles have done just this with their Neighborhoods profiles, a brilliant execution that showcases their neighborhood expertise.

Terabitz would do well to articulate the real value proposition behind this widget. It’s a neat demonstration of their technology, but right now, to no real end.

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I guess I’ll join the pile on. Terabitz launched this morning, and was greated largely by a big yawn in the RE blogosphere.

The site looks great. Works easy enough as well. So, why the disinterest then?

Part of it might be a general malaise I sense sweeping online real estate. The big ideas that launched a year ago now seem a little stale. The appetite for all things real estate all the time, may be waning as consumers move on to the next big trend and the easy money is no longer to be found.

And unfortunately, while providing a pretty face and some fancy AJAX implementation, Terabitz is really recycling old ideas (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) into a new shell.

The big story here really seems to be that the company was given $10 million in VC funding and was originally conceived by a 15 year old kid, who is now the CTO of the company. He rounds out a team based of former execs from HouseValues and Move.com and surprisingly, Travis Chow, formerly of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research).

This company isn’t shy about dishing out the hyperbole either. Gotta love a press release that starts like this:

Every now and then consumers are introduced to a product that fundamentally changes the rules, rendering all prior offerings insufficient or even obsolete. Consider what iTunes has done for music, TiVo for television, or eBay for auctions, to name a few.

What Terabitz does give you is a real estate “dashboard” which you can customize with various data sources, including local amenities and market data. Start with an address and then pick and choose and drag and drop up to nine modules on your page.

1000Watt blog calls it the “Netvibes for real estate” and you could probably accomplish many of the same results had you just used that site. Yahoo Pipes would let you do the same thing too.

My biggest gripe with the site is I had no idea from where it was pulling its data. Other than the obviously branded icons (Zillow, Craigslist, Google) – I’m not sure where the data is coming from and how accurate it is.

Case in point, the comps it pulled on my house ranged from $75K to $1.49 Million. I’m no real estate agent, but that doesn’t seem right to me.

Terabitz is not a bad effort out the gates. Just weakly defined and it doesn’t really solve any pressing need for me. If they can better refine the concept on pulling a few key data sources together rather than everything including the coffee cup, then they may be onto something.

More on Terabitz from BloodhoundBlog and VentureBeat.

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