Real Estate Shows, the online virtual tour provider, recently launched new features of their platform which now includes the ability to create a ‘flyer’ of any of your listings. You can see an example on their site (see New Construction In Woodland Hills!).

I’m a fan of the Real Estate Shows (RES) product even though I’m not personally that fond of the slideshow type presentations it generates – I prefer video tours myself, but that’s just my bag. That said, the RES platform makes it quick and easy for Realtors to create a slick looking presentation that is miles above the whirl-around-til-I-puke 360 tour. That, in of itself, is a win – the more Realtors abandoning that ancient technology the better, in my books.

RES’ new flyers are a significant change in strategy for the company however, and now lines them squarely up against another popular web-based marketing solution, vFlyer – both of whom are gunning for the single property website providers. If I were in that business I’d be worried or busy innovating.

It’s not too much of a stretch to see RES eventually offering Realtors the option to buy unique URLs (123MainSt.com for example) for any of the flyers they generate. In fact, it’s a probably a pretty logical step and an easy secondary revenue stream for them (reselling domain registrations).

I’ve long been a fan of single property websites in certain circumstances (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?) and with today’s challenging market, any step a Realtor can take to differentiate themself in a listing presentation or help move a property should be looked at. Oliver Muoto from vFlyer recently penned a great piece on Single Property Sites – Dispelling the Myths and Embracing the Benefits – that I would encourage anyone who is still on the fence to read.

The bottom line here is that, with a very minimal investment, Realtors have the ability to reclaim virtual ownership of their listings – whose sole existence online to date likely lies buried in an IDX feed. Solutions from vFlyer or RES make it easy to re-purpose existing content (listing description, photos, etc.) into a quick and simple web presence for all your listings.

So rather than your listings feeding leads to a broker’s e-Team, with a smart syndication strategy (both RES and vFlyer allow you to push listings out to Google Base, Oodle, Edgeio and others), single property web sites (or ‘flyers’) can help steer any web traffic (read curious buyers) directly to your inbox.

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Inman News names the finalists for the 2007 Innovator Awards. For more on some of the nominees’ accomplishments, read:

Coldwell Banker

• Coldwell Banker Opens Office in Second Life

Foxtons

• Foxtons Imports Audioshows to USA

Google Street View

• Next Generation Virtual Tours

John L. Scott

• John L. Scott breaks the mold
• The Evolution of Map Based Searches

Point2NLS

• Point2Homes Thinks Inside the Box

Trulia Voices

• Trulia Finds Its Voice

vFlyer

• vFlyers Lets You Put Listings on Your Blog
• Merchandizing Real Estate Photos with vFlyer

WellcomeMat

• WellcomeMat – The Killer App for Real Estate Video

Zillow Q&A

• Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?

Also on the list, some great real estate blogs; 3 Oceans Real Estate, BloodhoundBlog, Real Estate Tomato and Transparent Real Estate.

Congrats to all the nominees!

[Full disclosure: I work for Inman News.]

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Drew Meyers is right. Facebook is Completely Changing the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants to build the first social media OS and with the F8 release last week, he’s done just that.

To recap. Facebook’s F8 release means anyone can build an application on top of the social network and have it distributed throughout its entire user base. What this means is, Facebook is opening up its platform and instantly giving developers access to their over 20+ million users. And it’s even offering to give them 100% of the advertising and transaction revenue they generate.

Why is Facebook being so generous? Because they know the more things they can offer for people to do, the more time people will hang out on the site (and believe me, it can be addictive), which simply gives them more options to ultimately monetize that traffic.

This is pretty groundbreaking stuff, because it means as a developer you can instantly launch your product to a massive audience. No surprise then to date, more than 70 companies have taken them up on their offer.

Brian Brady argues that MySpace should just buy a number of the new Real Estate 2.0 players. I agree with his rationale – though I doubt it will happen and besides, Facebook has just scooped them.

So, how could some of the Real Estate 2.0 players take advantage of Facebook?

Zillow could allow you to share your home’s Zestimate to your network or your network’s network and allow people to modify the Zestimate based on their local knowledge (a simple yes/no if they think it’s accurate) – Zillow could easily build out the accuracy of their Zestimates in local markets.

Trulia could build out its Voices product so you could ask and answer questions to Trulia experts through the Facebook environment.

vFlyer could let you share your listing flyers to your whole network and have people pass them on to others as well.

Newcomers like Yourstreet and My-Currency are all crowd dependent. They should be angling immediately to integrate their products into Facebook’s user base.

I’m increasingly convinced that social networks are going to be an important arena for agents to focus their marketing (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook) – but I also think, moving forward, that they’re going to be critically important to driving the success of some of these new Internet based companies as well.

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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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vFlyer, the classified listings service, unveiled a new widget service to its members today that allow you to take your v-Flyer-hosted listings with you anywhere, including your blog.

Previous vFlyer coverage:

• vFlyer Posts Your Listings For You
• vFlyer Retools For Real Estate

vFlyer’s widget editor lets you customize either horizontal or vertical galleries, or if you have lots of listings you can create a scrolling display of images. You can choose to create either Flash or JavaScript widgets and vFlyer churns out the necessary HTML code to let you post it on your own website, a blog, social networks or online marketplaces like eBay.

Basic customizations like background color and link colors so you can better blend your widget in with the rest of your site. See the following example:

vFlyer is interesting as it’s morphing from being strictly a online classifieds platform into a single property web site provider (see Do Single Property Websites Sell Homes?) and now to a full listings management package.

However, unlike total web site solutions like Ubertor, Top Producer and Point 2 Agent – vFlyer provides agents with a custom online marketing platform and inventory management system. You then have the ability to pipe that data into whatever environment you choose. That could be a Wordpress blog or even your existing web site.

What I really like about this idea because it allows you to be much more flexible in your hosting options and doesn’t tie to you to one exclusive provider for all your web business needs. This isn’t for everyone; but for more tech savvy Realtors, this “offsite” approach could give you the ability to pull together many disparate elements (blogs, forums, etc.) and other real estate widgets (see Real Estate Widgets for your Website) and create the ultimate real estate portal.

vFlyer currently lets you post up to 10 active flyers for free. Premium plan start at $19.95/month after that.

More coverage:

• VentureBeat » Vflyer releases classified ad widget

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vFlyer, who I’ve written about before, has just launched a series of enhancements that tailor the service even more specifically for real estate professionals.

Among the new features are more real estate-related categories and new syndication partners, including Trulia. vFlyer also now lets agents post their photo and company logos, as well use the REALTOR^® logo. For brokers, vFlyer has implemented a bulk upload capability that can integrate into their existing systems to eliminates the need for manual entry.

vFlyer is evolving into a nice automated tool for an agent to build a minisite for every one of their listings, a trend that I see becoming increasingly popular in the future, whether it’s done through a blogging platform or through one of these third party services.

vFlyer remains free, for the time being.

More reading: Greg Sterling likes vFlyer but has some doubts about their business model

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vFlyer is a new startup that aims to help you create a virtual flyer and post it to online classifieds sites like Google Base, Oodle and Craigslist, as well as to a number of other paid sites too. It’s very similar to the service Postlets.com already provides, but adds a number of unique features.

Like Postlets, vFlyer allows you to use a number of very nice templates to display items for sale or listed properties. (e.g., Beautiful Pacific Heights Flat for Vacation Rental). Creating a vFlyer is very simple, just a matter of filling in a number of fields with the appropriate information. The whole process takes little time and is very straightforward. Using vFlyer, anyone can easily have a professional looking listing ad in minutes.

Hitting the publish button automatically creates a unique URL for your listing and sends it out to all of vFlyers partner sites, but unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to be more selective about which sites you can send it to. Right now, it seems to be an all-or-nothing approach. vFlyer does give you some bookmarklets and the raw HTML code that will allow you to post your listing to other sites (eBay, craigslist) – but overall this solution seems a little kludgey to me.

Once you’ve published your listing however, vFlyer has a number of advanced feautres you can use, including sending your listing to more people via email or downloading it as a HTML or PDF document (which you could then use in your flyer boxes). On the backend, once your vFlyers are live, their statistics tab gives you traffic statistics on all your published listings for analysis. This is all pretty slick.

One very cool thing is that vFlyer is partnering with RapLeaf, an online reputation service which I wrote about earlier, so that Realtors can market and benefit from their online reputations.

vFlyer is currently in Beta, so creating a flyer and using the service is currently free. No word on whether they plan on charging for the service in the future.

Read more about vFlyer here: Wanted: A Way to Profit by Simplifying Web Classifieds – New York Times

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