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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A while back I was in the audience at an industry conference when a woman on stage asked this question: “At the end of the day, do any of these online real estate companies really help anyone buy or sell a home?”

My initial reaction – as someone running one of “these” companies – was to dismiss the question as gratuitous, and dead wrong.

She’s just trying to provoke the audience. We provide all kinds of information on our site – of course we’re helping. And that’s what a REALTOR is there for anyway. So what’s the problem?

But the question kept creeping back into my head in the following weeks, prodding me to dig deeper into our value proposition and think about what it would take to answer “yes,” unequivocally.

How could we at HomeFinder.com – and, for that matter, my colleagues and competitors elsewhere in online real estate – provide a more essential service? And while our REALTOR partners would always be the ones who would get properties bought and sold, what could we do to help them get to that goal more efficiently?

Doing this, of course, would not be easy. The online real estate category is a crowded place. Consumers can view listings on myriad sites, all of which offer functionality that is strikingly similar. A set of standards and best practices has emerged as a result – which is good – but with that comes a pressure to stick to proven formulas, familiar features and accept assumptions as to what an online real estate site should and should not do. And that can be quite limiting.

So how do we move forward? I don’t have clear answers yet, but here are some things I believe to be true:

We need to take more risks

This sounds trite, but it’s true. When is the last time an online real estate company did something that made you think, “Wow, that’s gutsy?” Putting real estate listings online in 1994 was gutsy; Zillow took a big risk offering home values online ten years later. But who’s sticking their neck out now? It’s been awhile.

At the beginning of 2009, we expanded from being a technology provider to major newspapers across the country, previously known as Homescape, to rebranding as HomeFinder.com and growing our business to become a world-class home search and information site. While this is a goal we continue to strive toward, the HomeFinder.com name change was both a catalyst and reminder of not only what our site and our competitor sites offer, but also what consumers truly want — to find a home.

Granted, this isn’t Page Six material. But we’re relatively new to the game and that also puts us in a position to more easily escape our own history than others. That’s an opportunity I plan to capitalize on.

Online real estate needs more big moves.

It’s not just about a house, it’s about living a life

Having all the listings – including FSBO’s – is something we at HomeFinder pride ourselves on. But we need to understand that for most people, the house is just part of what goes into a decision to live somewhere.

To make that important decision more effectively, consumers need to get a sense for what lies beyond the four walls of the home they see on the screen. Sure, most sites offer school ratings, basic demographic information and some high-level housing market data.

But today we can go beyond that. The emergence of the “Real-time Web” allows us to capture what’s happening now in any given place, to hear the ambient noise of a neighborhood. The number of new APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) makes exciting mashups of place-based images, video and data possible in ways we could online imagine just a year or two ago.

It’s time to innovate in these areas.

A more effective model: better connect home finders with home sellers

Recently, a small storm erupted over a pornographic advertisement appearing on Realtor.com. While this was entirely inadvertent (apparently the result of an error in their ad serving system) it did underscore a point: The largely ad-based online real estate category often delivers a less-than-optimal user experience.

Ads, featured listings and the like can be quite effective for our agent and broker partners. But for consumers, they often just get in the way.

How can we deliver a better experience that gets consumers where they want to go more efficiently, while also placing our broker and agent customers in the right place, at the right time, on the right platform?

We’re working on some of the answers at HomeFinder.com as I write.

Call to action

In the end, the conference panelist’s question was not an annoyance – it was a call to action. To deliver even more value to consumers and practitioners. To rethink the online real estate formula. To challenge ourselves to question those things we take for granted.

I do not have many answers at this point, just directional notions like those I list above. But I’ll get there.

If you’d like to have your writing featured on FOREM blog, please email us at futureofrealestate@gmail.com

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I first met Gary at his keynote at Real Estate Connect in New York where I had the opportunity to corner him for an video interview (see Leverage the power of social media).

Gary’s book Crush It has been tearing up the best-seller lists and I’m stoked to announce that as of today, Crush it is available as a vook.

I could write a lengthy blog post about the app – but Gary sums it best…

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Crush It vook app contains 18 never-before-seen videos and the full content of the book. It is available for immediate purchase on iTunes (App store download) and on the Web.

[Full disclosure: I've been working on this app for the last couple of months. Vook was founded by Inman News publisher Brad Inman.]

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You can see a live demo here.

It’s a sharp looking design that really pushes Wordpress beyond its blogging basics. For just shy of a hundred bones (a pretty small investment really) you get a great looking web site with a lot of baked in functionality.

But more than just a good looking site — with a choice of four color schemes — you get the benefit of Wordpress’ fantastic SEO optimization, an integrated blog and all the great plugins and hacks available to Wordpress site owners.

I particularly liked the way Agentpress gives you customizable listing templates for individual properties which incorporate some nice design elements like the Lightbox-esque popups and embedded Google Maps. Plus, because each listing is stored as a separate post in the Wordpress database, Agentpress gives you a modest property search tool right off the home page to index your individual listings/posts.

Marry these property pages with a vanity URL and you’ve got yourself a pretty snazzy single-property website.

After a bit of a lull, there’s been a slew of real estate-related activity on Wordpress recently, starting with the Local Market Explorer plugin released by Zillow (see New Local Market Explorer plugin for Wordpress).

Now, with premium theme options like Agentpress (the iReal Estate Theme is another premium theme available for purchase) and an embeddable IDX solutions like that from Diverse Solutions, you’ve got the makings of pretty kick-ass website – right off the shelf.

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Seriously. I love the honesty. The attitude. And the tongue in cheek humor puts it over the top.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Besides, any guy who can take a crescent wrench to the face 5 times will win my business ever time.

Looking for a mobile home? Check out Cullman Liquidation.

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Her answer was posted on YouTube. I’ve posted the video below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks Pam!

I’d also like to throw this question out to the rest of the real estate industry – send me your video response via YouTube and I’ll post them all here on this blog.

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Want to learn how to Crush It?

Web 2.0 guru and now best-selling author Gary Vaynerchuk will be holding court at the Bell House in Brooklyn on October 27th, starting at 9pm, for an exclusive FREE event.

RSVP on the Eventbrite page – and make sure you get their early to secure your spot! The place is filling up quickly.

Gary will be joined by a guest that night for a very special announcement, and the evening will feature an exclusive montage of never-before-seen, behind-the-scenes video footage. An after party with Clabo, who brought you the Crush it! music video, will top off the evening.

It should be quite the night…

UPDATE: Want to hang out and drink champagne with Gary V. backstage before his presentation at the Bell House on October 27th? Just reserve a spot on the Eventbrite page and then get two of your friends to reserve tickets as well. Send all three of your confirmation codes to garyvbellhouse@gmail.com and they’ll draw one email as the winner. The winner and his or her two friends will then get to go backstage before the show and spend time CRUSHING IT! one on one with Gary V!

Photo by affiliatesummit

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Layar is a European company that has developed a platform that helps developers customize and build these data layers (see Layar MARS Browser Supplements Reality on Sellsius blog).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Called their Reality Browser, it has already been used by French company MeilleurAgents.com to create a layer that displays realtime property valuations in Paris (see Augmented Reality Real Estate Valuations).

The big news this week however, is that Layar is now available in the iTunes Store (Download Link) for the iPhone 3GS handset; which will potentially take this application to a huge new market.

As consumer awareness grows of AR, I’ll bet we’ll see many more innovative uses of this technology in the months to come.

In fact, an article in the latest issue of Fast Company reports that Trulia has already developed a layer for Layar’s Reality browser. The app will “overlay listings on top of a Google phone’s camera view. Scan a neighborhood’s available properties and even connect with the realtors.” (emphasis added)

Coming soon to an iPhone near you?

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Ork Posters prints beautiful neighborhood maps for cities across the US; including Seattle, Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago,DC and Philly, among others. The maps are designed by Jenny Beorkrem from trimtabdesign.com.

For the true font-o-phile, these works are wonderful typographic inspiration. But regardless, they would look great hanging in your office or conference room and make for a great conversation piece. Also would be a fantastic thank you gift; especially for any relocation clients moving in to a new city.

Posters are printed with soy-based ink on 100% recycled paper. Various color styles are available for each city and they run between $22 and $27 a pop.

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A video demonstration from their paper shows the software in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While only tangentially related to real estate marketing (though imagine the fun you putting together a listing presentation…) – what I think this technology points to is a rise of alternate input methods that will push us beyond the keyboard. The iPhone has already demonstrated the appeal of multi-touch and I suspect we’ll be seeing even more creative uses of this kind of gesture-based interaction over the next few years.

Text based search has been held back somewhat by a limited vocabulary and clumsy filters. So imagine searching for a home by simply drawing what you were looking for on Surface-like table or a Perceptive Pixel-type wall and have the software return the most relevant results to you.

It won’t be for everyone – but for the more adventurous, the future of real estate search may just be about letting your fingers do the talking.

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