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.
Cyberhomes gives you important information on your neighborhood.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)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.
Find out how much your neighborhood homes sold for with Domania.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Aircell, the company that offers Gogo Inflight Internet service to airline passengers, announced on Thursday that based on internal research, Gogo customer visits to NCAA-focused sites increased 953 percent during the first and second rounds of NCAA Tournament play.
Visits to sports-focused sites in general were up 123 percent from February. The most visited NCAA site on Gogo was CBSSports.com (Disclosure: CBSSports.com is a part of CBS Interactive, which also publishes CNET News.)
Real-estate search site Trulia announced Thursday that it set new records for site traffic in the first quarter of 2009. According to the company, visits were up 40 percent year over year, and property views increased by 50 percent over 2008. The site's overall page views increased 63 percent in 2009. Is Trulia's success an indication that the real-estate market is coming around?
Glu Mobile, a provider of mobile games, has debuted 30 titles on the newly launched BlackBerry App World. The 30 titles, which focus mainly on games, include Brain Genius 2, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and others. The titles are available now in the BlackBerry App World. The same apps are already available in the Apple App Store.
Online research company LexisNexis announced on Thursday that it has signed a deal with the Internal Revenue Service that will make it the exclusive provider of a "comprehensive set of online tax research solutions."
Under terms of the deal, LexisNexis will provide the organization with its Tax Center and Tax Advisor services, giving the IRS better information on finding tax errors. IRS customer service agents, revenue officers, attorneys, and auditors will have access to the services.
Real estate search site Trulia released a survey Thursday showing that the "American Dream" of owning a home is still alive even as the recession continues to plague the world. According to the company, more than 75 percent of Americans still consider owning a home as part of achieving their personal dreams, but only 5 percent of respondents say they believe that President Obama's plan to increase home ownership incentives will do any good "to restore faith in the American Dream of home ownership." In fact, 53 percent of those surveyed believe that creating jobs and establishing job security is the most important plan President Obama can follow. The full Trulia survey is available on the company's site.
Web analytics firm Omniture has released a new tool that will allow marketers to measure brand activity across Twitter, the company announced Thursday. According to Omniture executives, its service is the first of its kind to provide actionable analytics about what's going on in Twitter. Marketers who decide to use the Omniture tool will be able to view tweets among customers, vendors, employees, and competitors to evaluate how well their advertising campaigns are working. The tool is available now.
Mobile media firm SendMe announced Thursday that it has secured $12 million in a Series D round of funding that was led by Triangle Peak Partners. According to the company, it was able to secure the funding after it enjoyed strong growth over the past year and it plans to use the capital to increase its presence in the mobile market.
Local.com announced Thursday that it has renewed and expanded its agreement with Idearc Media, the company behind SuperPages.com and Verizon's Yellow Pages. According to the company, the new deal will allow SuperPages advertisers to receive premium placement on Local.com. According to both companies, most users won't recognize any difference in the two operations.
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'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 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.
Real estate search and resource service Trulia has a new tool built by the guys at Stamen Design called Snapshot. It's built off of Microsoft Virtual Earth and shows off little clusters of homes all over a 2D map. It's been pitched as an "alternate" view of the Trulia real estate listings, but a better way to describe it is pure, unadulterated eye candy.
That's not to say it's without use though. You can sort out houses in your area by price tag, or simply when they were listed. Each house has a little photo thumbnail, and you can click on any item to take you right to its Trulia page. You can also just sit back and watch the tool scroll through houses automatically, which pop up and give you bits of information.
While I don't think this system will ever replace an advanced search that can narrow down homes you're looking for by how many bathrooms and closets each house has, Snapshot is a great way to re-create the feeling of exploration you can get by driving around neighborhoods and looking at what's for sale.
Stamen Design's previous project with Trulia was HindSight, a tool that shows you what's happened to certain areas of the world historically. While neat to look at, unless you lived in one of the places that was coded in, it wasn't very useful. This new tool is far better for people who want to use their eyes to look for a new place to live.
Check out housing listings in a really slick timeline of money and availability.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Twitter's just launched a new portion of their service called Explore. It's essentially a "labs" section, and home to a handful of old (and new) tools to integrate and browse Twitter. The newest addition, called "Blocks," is a 3-D visualization of your friends and followers, and what amounts to a 3-D social graph of Twitter buddies. The tool loads up with a neat popping effect that looks like little rooftops, and similar to the neat startup video on the Apple TV. Each one is actually a message. Mousing over it will show you who wrote it, along with who wrote any surrounding messages. Clicking on it zooms you down to see what it says. One you're there, you can quickly navigate from message to message using your keyboard's arrow keys.
The visualizations were done by Stamen Design, the same group that created some neat flash tools to track activity on Digg, and Trulia's Hindsight--which launched earlier this year.
Check out your Twitter contacts, and their contacts all on the same page.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Browse from message to message by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.
Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to show which properties are hot. When combined, it's a very interesting way to watch growth trends and movement in residential areas.
Users can track the spread of housing developments and popularity in various U.S. cities over time. The team designed Hindsight as a way to spark discussion, and get people thinking in new ways about residential regions and population trends. Even if you're not looking to buy a house in one of these areas, this stuff is very fun to watch.
This map of Miami shows when properties have popped up, which is tracked on a timeline below.
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