estate

Real estate site offers Google Street View

Trulia, a residential real estate search engine, has incorporated Google Maps Street View into its Web pages, the company said Wednesday.

The combination presents Google's view of a particular property from the road and lets users virtually pivot around to see the surrounding area. It works in the 40 cities where Google has supplied imagery for its Street View service.

It's nothing that couldn't have been done manually before by typing an address into a separate window with the Google view, or likely even with an on-page mashup, but having the curbside vantage readily available is certainly … Read more

Zillow launches 'Mortgage Marketplace'

Real estate site Zillow is set to launch on Thursday a service that will let borrowers get quotes anonymously and lenders get leads for free.

People applying for home loans online now have to supply personal information to get quotes. Their information is often sold to other marketers, their credit rating can get harmed from so many credit checks, and the rates are usually higher than initially advertised.

Zillow's Mortgage Marketplace aims to solve those problems. Borrowers fill out detailed loan request forms but do not provide any personally identifiable information. When customized quotes are available, the borrowers get … Read more

Former Yahoo CEO Koogle joins real estate fray

Not much news has circulated about former Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle since he left the Internet company in 2001 in the midst of the dot-com bust. He had a brief stint as interim CEO of social network Friendster in the ensuing years, but now Koogle is trying his hand at real estate development. His luxury Mexican beach villas, of which there are seven, are now on sale for $6.2 million each, according to a statement Monday from his company El Banco.

Koogle isn't the first Internet executive to eschew virtual investments for ones in real estate. Jim Clark, … Read more

Where Randall promises he won't walk out this episode

EPISODE 34

Today, we rant about how J.R.R Tolkien's estate took home a whopping $62,000 from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. $62,000--that's like your dad's salary for a movie trilogy that grossed over $8 billion worldwide. Plus, we talk Fight Club reborn on Broadway, and Thriller's 25th anniversary netting some awful bonus tracks.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

DotHomes real-estate search site makes U.S. debut

Another week, another real-estate search site. DotHomes has gone live in the United Kingdom and South Africa, and it is now launching in the United States.

The free site offers short descriptions of properties to buy or rent, then links to agent sites. Looks fairly standard, except it also offers heat maps of local prices and enables video uploads for home sellers who think photos just don't do their home justice.

The DotHomes launch and the nationwide launch of the Roost home-buying site last week would seem to bolster the premise of an article in The New York Times … Read more

Roost launches home-buying search engine

To buy or not to buy? That is the question.

Regardless of where you stand in that debate, there is no dearth of Web sites to help you research, or just drool.

Joining the growing list of real estate sites is Roost, which was set to launch publicly on Wednesday.

The site differs from most of the more established real estate sites in that it is focused on search and is not supported by advertising. It also touts a comprehensive database and fast results.

Roost has partnered with Multiple Listing Services in 12 different U.S. cities with the goal … Read more

Fake NY Craigslist ad seeks renter who will pay in cookies

UPDATE: The Craigslist post in question has been flagged for removal.

A Craigslist ad for an available room in a two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan's pricey West Village claimed that the asking price was $1 per month--and a fresh batch of cookies every day. (As of Wednesday morning, the ad was flagged for removal and is no longer available on Craigslist.)

Yeah, it's tongue-in-cheek. As Gotham gossip blog Jossip put it, "There's no way someone would really rent out a room in the West Village for $1 a month and daily fresh baked cookies. In the West … Read more

Gotham Geek Guidebook: AOL's new downtown digs

It'll be interesting to see how AOL chooses to classify its new corporate headquarters on 770 Broadway in downtown Manhattan. The historic building, formerly home to the Wanamaker's department store, spans an entire city block and now holds offices of one variety or another for companies as varied as J. Crew, Viacom and Billboard. And there's famously a K-Mart (one of Manhattan's few-and-far-between big-box discount retailers) on the ground floor. It's touted by owner Vornado Realty Trust as being "in the heart of the Village." Well, kind of.

Because so many of New … Read more

AOL packs its bags for Manhattan, with emphasis on ads

Looks like the "A" in AOL actually stands for "Advertising." The once-mighty online media company has announced a shakeup that will place ad revenue squarely in its corporate crosshairs, grouping its advertising properties--Advertising.com, as well as the recent acquisitions of Tacoda, Adtech, Third Screen Media and Lightningcast--into a new entity that it calls "Platform A."

Former Tacoda CEO Curtis Viebranz has been appointed executive vice president and president of Platform A, and a statement from AOL asserts that this is "the final stage in AOL's transition from an access business … Read more