Widgets, comments, heat maps and other welcome upgrades
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.
