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Several popular online real estate sites have been busy making upgrades over the past few days, welcome news for home buyers and sellers using the Web.
The first change comes from Zillow, which since its launch earlier this year has frustrated homeowners and real estate professionals by providing inaccurate portrayals about home values and features. "Zillow is hoping to address that issue with a new version of the service that leverages the knowledge of the people who know the property the best -- the homeowners," reports the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. On Wednesday Zillow began allowing owners to add information about their homes, calculating new values based on their input and letting them add comments about recent remodeling work, etc. By letting owners do some of the footwork about their properties, Zillow hopes to be able to provide a more accurate, useful service (although a professional appraisal is still the best way to find out a home's value).
Elsewhere on the Web, ZipRealty recently began letting registered browsers rate, review, and comment on any home listed for sale in its website. The comments left so far have leaned towards the unfavorable side. "Mostly they're saying, `What were they thinking?' and `The price is too high for the square footage,' or `The yard's too small for that price,'" ZipRealty's Patrick Lashinsky said in one report. "Sometimes when it comes from a third party, rather than an agent, it carries more weight for sellers."
Another housing search engine, Trulia, is expanding its service to include all 50 states and next week will start providing more useful information about neighborhoods -- school quality, home sales trends, crime data, "heat maps" and more. "While it’s unclear how valuable it is to designate a neighborhood as hot (for instance, number of sales is ranked on an absolute basis, driving larger neighborhoods higher), this kind of data is going to find a use, from voyeurism to nervous buyer counseling to (perhaps) smarter investments," says the GigaOM blog.
And last but certainly not least, Coldwell Banker's Personal Retriever is making the home search process even easier by taking the form of a widget that will display listing information directly on a computer desktop. On downloading the widget and setting up specifications for the kind of home they're interested in, consumers "will have the most updated listings right at their fingertips, without having to search through e-mail or log on to a Web site," reports the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
If you were among the millions of people affected by the recall of potentially explosive laptop batteries by Dell and Apple recently, you might be wondering if there's some alternative power source out there that might be a little less incendiary and a little more reliable. "The prevailing technology to power gadgets is lithium-ion batteries, which experts view as relatively safe despite last month's recall," says a Reuters report today. Part of the problem is that more is expected of laptop batteries than ever before, as people use their machines for power-hungry tasks like video-conferencing, interactive games, and watching full-length movies. Technology is available that would produce safer, longer-lasting batteries, but don't hold your breath for the new power sources to hit store shelves soon. "The next step is fuel cells, but (they) are a little way away," Gartner chief of research Jim Tully told Reuters. "In five to 10 years, fuels cells will become an integrated replacement for conventional batteries."
Catering to the needs of both REALTOR® members and their potential clients has helped make the Houston Association of REALTORS®' website one of the most successful association sites around. HAR members can access the MLS, check for leads, and pay dues online, among other activities. Consumers can search for listings and agents in the Houston area, of course, but some of the more unique features they'll find include a multilingual search tool, school comparisons, a "Highrise Finder" for apartment searching, and tools for finding only recently-added listings and open houses. Members and consumers can even search listings via their cellphones, and consumers have a chance to rate the service quality of individual REALTORS®.
One of the tools HAR uses to guide its development of features for the website is a University of Houston study on home buyer and seller preferences. "The survey showed one clear thing," HAR president Bob Hale told the Houston Chronicle, "and that is the more the consumer uses the Internet, the happier a consumer they end up being. It has actually made for a better experience between the Realtor and the buyer and the seller."
If you've read the Harry Potter books or seen the movies, you probably remember the ever-changing staircases at Hogwarts: “wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump.” Some of those shape-shifting qualities from the realm of Harry and his wizard pals might be appearing in a smart building near you -- although hopefully for more practical purposes. A new breed of architects is developing the concepts of "responsive structures" and shape-changing building envelopes, which would allow buildings to monitor their environment and change shape to suit a situation, much like a living organism.
"Shape-changing envelopes offer architects the ability to produce buildings that condition themselves in very simple, natural and sustainable ways," said architect Tristan d'Estree Sterk in a Wired News report. "They enable buildings to be conceived of as systems that change shape to improve the way people live." Such systems might allow a tall building to brace itself against strong gusts of wind or enable a home to shake snow from its roof. Just like trees that bend, says the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Anders Nereim, "the interior of a structure also needs to change responsively. We can't afford to have spaces that sit unusable for large portions of the day due to a fixed configuration."
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