Webware

The housing market is showing signs of returning. According to a recent report, home prices have posted a small gain and economists are suggesting that the housing market might be stabilizing.

Realizing that, and especially considering that first-time homebuyers are trying to capitalize on the government's $8,000 credit, sellers might be more willing to sell their homes than they were last year. If you're one of those folks, you'll want to consult some services on the Web that will help you get the job done. From valuation tools to agent search services, you'll have everything you need to make a deal on your house.

But if your house isn't quite ready yet and you're looking for some design tips to make it more appealing to would-be buyers, check out this roundup I wrote recently helping you do just that.

Sell your home

Cyberhomes: Cyberhomes' main focus is home valuations. Simply input the address of your property and the site will tell you how much it believes it's worth.

But Cyberhomes does more than appraisals. The site also provides a listing of homes for sale in your area, where you can find "distressed" homes you might be able to buy on the cheap, and neighborhood information down to income and demographic data. It's a full-featured site.

Domania: Domania can help you see how your home compares with others that have already sold, which is helpful since most homes are valued based on a number of factors, including recent sales in your neighborhood. It won't tell you the value of your home, but since real appraisals are completed by comparing nearby homes that are similar to yours, Domania should help you find the sweet spot for pricing your home. I was impressed by the sheer number of houses it listed on the site. You should find just about any home sold in your area.

... Read more

"Things are very good at Zillow," Rich Barton, CEO of the online real estate company, was telling me. We're in the thick of the worst economic crisis of a generation and a depressed real estate market, so this means that Barton is either a very clever CEO or an audacious liar. I was at first inclined to believe the latter, but left the interview convinced of the former. He's a canny Web entrepreneur.

It hasn't all been smooth sailing for Zillow. In October, Barton laid off about 25 percent of Zillow's staff. He said he did it because he "couldn't forecast" his business and had to assume the worst scenario. However, the trough following the 2008 bust ended up not being as bad as he thought it was going to be for Zillow, and the company is now back up to its October 2008 staffing level of about 130 people.

Zillow is currently growing, but in a different way than it was before. Page views and unique visitors are up. The site had 8.8 million unique visitors in March, which is a 70 percent year-over-year growth. Zillow has the twice the users at this point as Barton's team originally projected. However, the revenue per unique user is down to a third of what he expected it would be.

There was, of course, a fundamental shift in user behavior after the bust. But it wasn't all bad. Buying activity on Zillow went down, though site traffic went up. As Barton says, "Buyers are on the sidelines, but not passively." They're monitoring the market, he says, looking for the time to jump in, to either buy or sell. Like the Zillow site itself, physical open houses are crowded, he says. The browsing activity doesn't get reflected in home transaction data. Neither sales volumes nor prices are going up, even if people are circling open houses and online real estate sites like buzzards.

Until the market becomes a place where buyers and sellers want to engage again, they continue to gather information. So Barton continues to sell advertising and new data services.

I told Barton I thought Zillow was "real estate porn." Barton accepts this--his business at the moment is based on it--and says simply, "there's a practicality to real estate porn. People are dreaming about their next home. That's positive. They're planning."

Barton is making access to that real estate porn easier. A new iPhone app shows you the Zillow price estimate ("Zestimate") of homes as you walk or drive by them, and Barton says 10 percent to 20 percent of the site's queries are coming from the iPhone app, which was downloaded 234,000 times in its first 12 days of release.

Barton says two-thirds of the site's users are in the market right now, though when he says "in the market" he means waiting for the market to look good enough to buy or sell. He says 21.9 percent of the homeowners on Zillow are underwater on their homes (they owe more on the mortgage than the home is currently worth), and that the overall Zillow home value index "is in freefall, down 14 percent year over year." There are, he says, very few markets where the acceleration of the housing price decline is slowing--but those are mostly the markets that got hit the worst first, such as Los Angeles and Modesto, Calif.

But listing homes in foreclosure on Zillow is a growth business. "They advertise!" Barton says.

... Read more

Last week, I looked at five real estate search sites and discussed their merits as tools for searching for a home. So now that you have that dream house picked out, it's time you get down to the business of finding a real estate agent and researching both the home itself, and the neighborhood it's in--just to make sure it's still a place you want to live.

After all, moving to a new home can't be as simple as finding a home you like and buying it immediately, right?

Find your real estate agent with DoorFly
Once you've found the home you like on sites like Trulia or Realtor.com, you have to find a real estate agent to help you look at homes, secure the best deal, and get you into your new abode. But finding the best real estate agent isn't always easy.

That's where DoorFly comes in. Instead of calling different real estate firms to find the best agent, you can use DoorFly to explain your needs and watch as real estate agents bid to work with you.

When you first sign up for DoorFly, you're asked to provide the area where you'd like to live, your home-buying needs, an affordable price you're willing to pay, and desired home features. That information is then posted on the site and will be viewed by real estate agents who also signed up. Interested agents will contact you and inform you of their knowledge and experience. But here's the kicker--they will also offer an incentive rebate from their commission at closing to sweeten the pot. I found that sometimes that discount is 5 percent of their fee, but it can be up to 20 percent off, depending on the market. Either way, it's a great way to save some money.

As interesting and useful as DoorFly can be, I was disappointed with its general lack of support. Granted, it's a start-up that few people have heard about, but so far, the site only has real estate agents from Indiana, Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina using the site. That's obviously an issue for those who wish to move elsewhere in the U.S. and one that DoorFly can hopefully address at some point in the future.

DoorFly is a compelling and unique service, and you should look at if you want to buy a home in one of those locations. It's easy to use, the real estate agents offer good deals, and generally, they seem to be knowledgeable.

Research mortgages and neighborhoods with HomeThinking
HomeThinking is designed quite well. When you're brought to the main page, you can quickly and easily find a real estate agent in any of the 50 U.S. states, perform research on mortgages in cities and towns across the country, or gain knowledge about different neighborhoods in major markets. It's a great resource if you're unsure whether you want to move to a specific location.

When I started evaluating HomeThinking, I first looked for a real estate agent in both big cities like New York and San Francisco, as well as small suburbs in my area. In all cases, the site returned a slew of real estate agents from companies both big and small. It was outstanding.

HomeThinking's neighborhood search is also a great feature that allows you to compare big cities, as well as mid-level markets like Akron, Ohio. When you perform a comparison, the site delivers a slew of results that examine which areas of the new city resemble your current city, as well as reviews by those who live there.

For example, HomeThinking claims that those living in the Castro-Upper Market area of San Francisco will find a similar lifestyle in New York City's West Village. It's a nice feature, but it would have been nice if more information was available. Simply telling me where to move if I like the scene I live in now won't help all that much.

But HomeThinking's best feature is its mortgage resource page, which takes an in-depth look into everything you ever wanted to know about mortgages in the location to which you're planning to move. Whether you're researching suburbs or big cities, the site will deliver the risk of a sub-prime mortgage crisis, leading lenders in the area, the average loan size, number of rejected applications, and much more. It even shows a heat map detailing where the majority of people are trying to buy homes. HomeThinking's mortgage research tool is best I've seen.

... Read more

The real estate market is in trouble and housing prices are plummeting. In other words, it is a great time to buy a house.

That's why we've compiled a list of real estate search sites and examined how well they can help you find your next home.

DotHomes
If you're looking to find homes, but you don't know where to start, DotHomes might be it. It's not the best real estate search site in this roundup, but it does a fine job of taking listings from across the Web and getting them to you quickly.

DotHomes sports a simple design, but I had issues with it. Its catalog view of all the listings is great and it provides basic information about the properties, but putting Google Maps with all the listings' locations above the individual homes makes little sense and I found myself scrolling up and down to figure out where they were. Worse, the site's filtering tools are placed next to the map, which meant I was forced to once again scroll to the top of the page just to narrow my search results.

If you want the most listings, DotHomes is the ideal destination. After inputting "New York City" into the site's search box, it returned 48,000 listings. That tally easily bested any other service in this roundup by thousands of properties. Thinking it must be a mistake, I tried my search again with quotations around "New York, NY" to ensure that's what it was searching for and it returned the same number of results. When I narrowed my search to individual ZIP codes and suburbs around the country, DotHomes continued to provide me with the most results. It was outstanding.

It should be noted that DotHomes doesn't have its own listings pages. Instead, it delivers search results from realty sites around the Web. Once you click on a property listing, you'll be brought to different realty Web sites. I found that annoying.

Realtor.com

Realtor.com is a huge site featuring millions of listings from across the Web. And although it takes all those listings from real estate agents, it doesn't redirect you to a realtor's page like DotHomes does, which makes it more usable.

Realtor.com's page is cluttered. It features a prominent search box, which is nice, but that's flanked by advertisements, featured listings in areas across the U.S., and some tools to help you in your real estate search that are only somewhat useful. That said, its search results pages are better designed and feature all the necessities--filter and display preferences--above and to the side of the listings. The listings pages are outstanding and feature the property's description and most importantly, a Live Maps display showing exactly where the property is located.

Although Realtor.com is a major site, I was a little disappointed with its search results. After inputting "New York City" into the search field, it only returned a little over 18,000 results. When I input a specific New York ZIP code--10012--it only returned 8 results. That's much fewer than the results derived from DotHomes. It was even beat badly by DotHomes in every suburban search I performed.

Realtor.com's listings pages were outstanding and featured all the information you'd expect from a real estate Web site, like mortgage calculators, interest rate finders, school locators, and tax information. The wealth of knowledge makes Realtor.com a fine destination if you don't mind fewer listings, but want more information.

Terabitz
Terabitz is a neat site that tries to make searching for real estate listings different than competing services. And although it achieves that goal, it will take some getting used to if you're accustomed to sites like Trulia or Realtor.com.

I was really impressed with the design of Terabitz. After inputting an area, the site returns all the listings it can find from across the Web, but also includes a series of tabs above those listings that provide links to services that can help you find information about the area where you're considering moving. Its "Local" tab features links to all the airports, hospitals, restaurants, and other places in a given area and displays them all on a Google Maps display to the left of the listings.

When I started searching for listings in Terabitz, I was disappointed with the number of results it returned. In fact, just under 3,000 listings were displayed when I searched for New York City properties. When I drilled down into one ZIP code, it found just three listings. Unfortunately, Terabitz isn't too capable when you want to search for suburban listings, either. Unlike Realtor.com or DotHomes, Terabitz had trouble finding listings in some areas I searched for and returned no results when others returned hundreds of listings.

My biggest complaint with the Terabitz search isn't the number of listings, though. Instead, I was disappointed with how long it took for the results page to load. It took longer than any other service in this roundup to deliver results and I found myself performing two searches on Trulia in the time it took to load a single Terabitz result page.

Trulia

Trulia features an outstanding design, a fair amount of listings, and some extra features like buying advice, that make it a great service to use when you decide to buy your next property.

Trulia may not feature the best design in this roundup--Terabitz gets that award--but it's designed almost as well. The home page features a prominent search box, a "news feed" for those who want to see new listings in areas they've searched for in the past, and links to foreclosure listings in areas where they have hit hardest. Its search results pages boast the same filter tools you'll find in sites like Realtor.com and its Google Maps display at the top right of the page makes locating properties easy. Even better, Trulia listings pages show Google Street View displays instead of maps, so you can see exactly what the building you want to buy looks like before you go there. It's a simple addition, but also the best feature on the site.

I was a little underwhelmed by the number of listings Trulia returned. When I searched for New York City properties, it found over 10,000 listings and when I narrowed it down to just one ZIP code, it found almost 200 listings. It doesn't come anywhere close to the number of listings you would find on DotHomes.

Much like Realtor.com, Trulia found a slew of suburban properties in disparate parts of the country and unlike Terabitz, returned those results quickly. Suffice it to say that searching on Trulia was a treat.

But Trulia's offerings go beyond listings. The site's "Stats and Trends" page is an outstanding resource to find out about the community you're thinking of moving to and its "Advice and Opinions" page will come in handy when you're ready to buy your home.

Trulia is a great service to find listings and learn about communities, but it's also the easiest to use out of any real estate search service. It's the best real estate search tool in this roundup. Period.

Where's Zillow?
Some of you are probably wondering why I decided not to include Zillow in this roundup. The answer is quite simple: I consider it a research tool, rather than a standard real estate search site.

I know that you can search for homes for sale on the site and it boasts thousands of listings, but anyone who has used the site knows that it's difficult to find homes thanks to a cluttered Live Maps display. That said, Zillow is extremely useful when searching for the value of a home.

In my own research for a home, I use a site like Trulia to find a property and perform better research on it with the help of Zillow. So, yeah, maybe it's a real estate search site in one sense, but I think it's a much better research tool. In fact, it's the best real estate research tool on the market.

Real estate search site Trulia announced Wednesday that it has inked a deal with 1020 Placecast, an advertising company that uses location-based information to target audiences, that will see the site's advertising become location-specific.

Once users input a location they want to learn more about on Trulia, Placecast will access that data and apply it as a key component along with common demographic data points like psychographic information to provide more targeted ads.

"Once we know the place a user is interested in, we can derive a lot of useful insights about what kind of consumer they are, and then serve them a very targeted ad," Alistair Goodman, CEO of Placecast, said in a statement.

In order to deliver that ad, Placecast works with publishers in categories such as travel, events, real estate, and weather to offer advertisements that not only try to appeal to visitors, but make their location a key factor in targeting them.

The partnership with Placecast is extremely important for Trulia. The company is naturally affected by the downturn in the real estate market, and it relies on home ownership for success. Realizing that, Trulia executives needed to act and increase revenue as quickly as possible during these suspect times, and they evidently believe Placecast is their best bet.

Real-estate sites had some tough times last week. First, Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, announced that it was laying off 20 percent of its staff, then Zillow, a service that delivers home values and lists sales, announced that it was forced to lay off 25 percent of its workforce.

But Trulia, which lets buyers find homes for sale across the United States, says it has no layoff plans and that it has enjoyed so much growth, it's actually looking to expand.

"We are not making any layoffs. All companies need to be smart in this environment and adjust to the market movements," Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia, said in an interview. "As a company, we are in a strong position. We always believed that we had to be aggressive but fiscally responsible, and that is why we are in the position we are (in) today. In fact, we are still making a few select hires, where they are important to our revenue growth."

Trulia has been one of the most proactive companies in the online real-estate market since its inception. The company formed a strategic partnership with Dash GPS to let Dash users find homes that are for sale in their area by connecting to the Trulia database, and its advertising network has proven to be a key component in creating a sound financial structure.

Regardless, Trulia is operating in an extremely competitive market. With competitors such as Zillow, Redfin, and DotHomes, it won't be easy for the company to stay ahead of a significant economic downturn, now that its competitors have significantly reduced expenses. But with strong growth and solid performance, Trulia believes that it can adapt to any financial issue that may arise.

A new commercial real estate site is opening its doors Tuesday: ZoomProspector. It's designed to help businesses find communities for new offices or plants, and then find the properties that fit their needs.

The service collects business stats on cities and counties, and lets you explore those in a clean interface. More importantly, it lets you search for communities that meet the criteria that matter to you. If you want a fast-growing, white-collar community near an active entrepreneurial ecosystem and a major airport, you probably already know where to look. But if you need to site and staff a manufacturing plant and are looking for community stability and an underemployed blue-collar workforce, there are options you may not know about. This service should help you find and compare them.

The ZoomProspector team gets its data from a variety of sources and has deals with chambers of commerce and commercial real estate companies to pull it all together. I saw an earlier beta of the site and found it hard to use, but I like the version that's being released Tuesday. I did find the "wizard" that walks you through community selection too linear, but you can skip it and enter in your criteria directly to search the database if you like.

The service will also connect you with consultants who specialize in industries or locations, as well as economic development agencies that can help you grease the skids when you get interested in a locale.

One might think it is a bad time to launch a real estate site, either commercial or residential, but in the coming months business owners who want to survive will be forced to take a very clinical view of their operations, which includes siting. This tool could help.

Facebook has simply gotten too big for downtown Palo Alto, Calif., where it has been headquartered since founder Mark Zuckerberg uprooted the company from dorm rooms at Harvard. With over 600 employees now on its payroll, Facebook will be moving to a bigger facility at the Stanford Research Park outside town--a former Hewlett-Packard building.

"This new space is the next step in our growth and positions us well to continue looking for a long term campus solution while also allowing employees to work together as much as possible," a statement from Facebook read. The company plans to complete the move in the first quarter of 2009. They will, however, probably keep the downtown headquarters around, both for space and nostalgia's sake.

"Palo Alto has been a great home for many start-ups and we are confident that with our move, other companies will occupy and thrive in the vacated spaces," the statement read. "We will likely continue to have space in downtown Palo Alto as well. We have loved our time in downtown Palo Alto and consider it part of the DNA here at Facebook. Many of our employees live in the area and will continue to be a part of the downtown community."

Facebook has, however, gotten rid of a housing subsidy offered to employees who opt to live in Palo Alto.

Zillow, watch out.

Google Maps now can show real estate listings, presenting pushpins that show houses for sale.

To show real estate results, click "Show search options," then select "Real Estate" from the drop-down list. The Web site then shows a list of properties for sale on the left tied to pushpins on the map on the right.

Search results can be refined by specifying price range or number of bedrooms and bathrooms. In addition, there's a text mode that will be more familiar to the classified ad crowd. (Huh? Text mode for a mapping site? There's still a small map visible.)

I can't help but be reminded of one of the first really interesting uses I encountered of Google Maps, a mashup by that showed Craigslist real-estate listings overlaid on Google Maps. At the time, back in 2005, Google hadn't released its maps programming interface, but times have changed. Not only is the API public, but the programmer behind the service, Paul Rademacher left DreamWorks Animation and joined Google.

(Via Google Maps Mania)