40+ Real Estate Web 2.0 Websites, Applications, and Communities
The following is a list of 40+ online web 2.0 websites, applications, and communities, some that are in beta (or even alpha) development stages. If you know if one we missed, by all means tell us, this should be an organic, ever growing list.
Home Values
It allows anyone to find rough estimates of the valuation of their home by searching comparable properties. While values are not always accurate, the site continues to get it better.
Beta property valuation tool competing directly with Zillow. It uses Google Maps in its technology mashup and allows you to do cool things like adjust values of properties given certain market conditions.
Valuations give you access to most of the same information that real estate professionals use to evaluate homes. Whether you own your place, are thinking of buying, or even just looking around, you can explore data ranging from property facts, value estimates, and a variety of important indicators of local and national changes in the housing market.
Free service that allows anyone to quickly and easily take the first step to buying, selling, or refinancing a home by providing instant access to property valuations, real estate professionals and additional services. eppraisal pulls together public record data from over 70 million homes to quickly and easily give you an estimated value range.
Listings
Scrapes real estate sites to find listings and brings it all together in a clean, well designed site. Using Google maps and RSS feeds, the site seems to have taken the lead in the future of online property listings.
GPS real estate searches from your cell phone
Craigslists – Google Maps mashup to find properties for rent or for sale in your area. The interface is deceivingly simple; dive in and discover how content-rich HousingMaps really is.
Retrove is a national vertical real estate search engine that allows you to search all types of real estate listings such as MLS listings, FSBO, foreclosures, classifieds and other types of property listings across the nation. Retrove provide you real estate search results that take you directly to the real estate listing source.
Buy, Rent or Sell US Apartments and Homes. A comprehensive real estate marketplace featuring millions of listings.
Property search engine Google maps mashup,aggregating listings from many online sources and making them easily searchable with a GoogleMap-based visual interface.
Next-generation, independent real estate search engine. We crawl and index millions of homes for sale and other properties, then organize and display them on a slick Google Map interface.
Roost offers parallel services - a search for consumers and a new platform for Realtors. Unlike other site, they dedicate their time and resources to being a great search engine and having up to the minute data for a dozen or so markets, with more being added daily.
Neighborhood
Help homebuyers, renters, and real estate agents find houses and apartments in great neighborhoods. Walk Score shows you a map of what’s nearby and calculates a Walk Score for any property.
Community of homeowners, buyers and renters sharing inside knowledge about their local neighborhoods. Discover a new neighborhood or share knowledge about your own. Track local real estate conditions in your area - what’s selling and what’s not. Connect with neighbors across the country and find out what a neighborhood is really like.
The first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.
Online service that helps home owners choose the most remarkable neighborhood real estate agents to sell their house.
Apartment search by neighborhood website. In addition to finding apartments, users can search neighborhood profiles, photos, interactive maps and user generated blogs and events. Hubbuzz is an apartment site that incorporates extensive neighborhood information and user generated blogs and comments from anyone in the community.
Comprehensive and customizable real estate Web site that fundamentally changes the online real estate industry by helping consumers make smart decisions before, during, and after the property transaction in ways never before possible. We, at Terabitz, realize that every home exploration is unique.
Estately (Washington State Only) - Beta
Created with the belief that home buyers need context when they’re looking for a home. At Estately you can learn about the surrounding area, the nearby shops, the character of the neighborhood and the style, size and price of a property.
New way of finding a place to live. If you want to move, you can let people in the area know you’re looking. If you want to sell or let a place, you can find interested people quickly. No hassle, no obligation, no estate agents.
Real estate information service that gives those of us who are not real estate professionals independent access to actual unfiltered information that is relevant to what is often our most valuable investment—our home—or any other real estate.
Agents
Agent Scoreboard (Some States)
Search for agents in your local area and read reviews and comments posted by real people that have used their services.
Real estate agent review service that helps home buyers and sellers find an Incredible Agent who can assist them in their real estate transactions.
Free service to consumers that enables you to search for real estate agents using meaningful criteria including: commission, location, sales history, services offered, experience level, and the estimated value of the home you are selling or buying.
Marketing
Classified ad creation, management and submission platform that enables online sellers to quickly and easily create attractive classified ads or “virtual flyers” that can be posted on dozens of leading online marketplaces in a few simple clicks.
Free template and photo hosting for craigslist classifieds
Video network that connects you with people and resources to most effectively market real estate, neighborhoods, cities, events and local businesses.
Use your digital photos to create stunning Internet Shows in less than 5 minutes! They will look and feel like TV commercials!
Online rewards system that enables real estate sellers and professionals to give Buyers and other users rewards.
Info
Supply housing shoppers with the info they need to make sound financial decisions about whether to buy or rent.
Foreclosure Radar (California Only)
Only place where you’ll find complete up-to-date information on every foreclosure opportunity available in California, including exclusive daily updates on every auction.
DIY (always good to know the competition, right?)
Industry’s first online brokerage for residential real estate.
Users are encouraged to list their property for sale for free. Buyer’s can browse listings with new technologies including drag-n-drop favorites, endless scroll searches and can view properties using data, pictures or maps.
Way to buy and sell a home—bringing together buyers and sellers in one place, and connecting all the resources you need to buy or sell your home.
RealEstate Communities
Free Online community for real estate professionals designed to help them promote and grow their business.
Real Estate Social Networking site out there. With a focus on networking, dealmaking, and education, the site brings a professional approach to the world of real estate for both the consumer and professionals.
Online real estate referral network, a business exchange that connects real estate practitioners and service providers across the country and around the globe.
Just Plain Cool Sites
Fantasy Real Estate
Manage your properties with software that lets you track rents, bills, advertisements and invoicing.
How to Promote Your Business Online - A Primer of 3
Being a complete online solutions company doesn’t come easy. Even we have a hard time keeping up with the cutting edge application that come online each and every day to help you (and us) promote ones business in a world that online.
So, how do we do it?
Probably in a lot of ways that you have done it for the past 20 years, but with a twist. Below we will walk though some of the tools we use, hopefully inspiring you to dive into the the world of cutting edge online marketing.
VFlyers
The way it was…Flyers
You would print them up, and put them under car windshield wipers, post to telephone poles, hand them out on a street corner.
How it is now…Vflyers
Create and manage attractive virtual flyers that can be automatically or manually submitted into leading online marketplaces!
With this application, you can create multiple flyers, image galleries, and post to craiglist and dozens of other advertising sites with the push of a button. Vfler tracks flyer views and contacts and you can manage these all in a very intuitive and user friendly interface. Best part of all, like most application we use here at inspiring design, llc - IT IS FREE. No better way of cutting costs then to do free online advertising.
Blogs
The way it was…Editorials
How could you get your voice heard? Submit an editorial to a local paper…Stand on a street corner and shout…
How it is now…Blogs, Blog, and more Blogs
Even my grandmother has one. Everyone now a days has a blog, and if you don’t, just get one, it is easy, cheap, and we can help you set one in in a snap. Once you have a blog, you have a voice, and if you get people interested in what you have to say, you have an audience, and then you have prospective clients… So, once you have one, how do you get readers? Here are some sites, tips, and tricks on how to promote your blog.
- Blog Rush
- Submit to RSS directories
- Submit to blog directories
- Submit to general directories
- Find out how much your blog is worth
- Social Media - Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Reddit, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube
- Forums - AuthorityBlogger, Bloggeries, SitePoint, Blogger Forum, BloggerTalk
Google Adwords
The Way it Was… buy ad space
Maybe in local newspapers, trade magazines, if your big enough, billboards - promote your business, pay even if nobody sees it, or if people you don’t care about seeing it are the only ones that actually do.
How it is now… buy ad space though Google, only pay if someone clicks the link
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a paid form of advertising, popularized mostly by the Google Ads. The concept is fairly simple. Businesses bid to be placed at or near the top of the search results for particular keyword phrases. The bidding is done on a “per-click” basis, meaning that a company pays a specific amount every time the engine sends them a visitor. In addition, the top results on Google also show up in the results of many of the popular search engines (usually listed as “sponsored” or “featured” results).
Read more at inspiring design, llc.
This is the first article in a weekly series of how to promote your business online.
35+ Small Business Online Resources - Inspiring Solutions for an Online World
Google Everything - AdWords, Analytics, Apps, Base, Calender, Code, Gmail, Local, Maps, Webmaster Tools
SpeedTest - Self explainitory, but this one gve as great interface and you can save results from session to session.
Yelp - Review and talk about what’s great (and not so great) in your area (restaurants, dentists, hairstylists, and anything local)
ZapReader - Web based speed reading program. Grain of salt alert: the site says you can experience a 300% increase in reading speed, without any loss in comprehension
YouSendIt: Have you ever had to clean out your inbox just so you’d have room to send out an email? YouSendIt puts and end to that trouble by sending files up to 2GB to your clients.
Basecamp: Basecamp offers a way to improve project communication. Use it to keep your teammates and clients informed about what’s going on with your projects.
Lulu: Lulu gives fledgling writers an easy way to get published. Each product is printed as it’s ordered, so you don’t have to build an expensive inventory.
PayPal: Give your clients a way to pay without sharing their financial information by using PayPal.
Campfire: Campfire is a web-based chat tool that’s ideal for online meetings with clients or coworkers.
LogMeIn: Don’t let your business suffer because you can’t take your computer on the road. Use LogMeIn to get access to your computer’s desktop anywhere
LinkedIn: LinkedIn offers online networking at its best. Find opportunities and contacts based on your work and the people you already know.
Craigslist: Craigslist is an invaluable tool for any freelancer. Find clients, sell your work, buy supplies, network and more using Craigslist.
l8r: If you’re working at 2AM but prefer that your client thinks you keep normal hours, you can use l8r to delay sending messages until a specified time. You can also use it to schedule emails that you know you’ll send, like reminders.
Pinger: Forgot to send an email? Don’t worry, you can send an audio email message to your recipient instead using Pinger.
Yugma - Free online collaboration with real-time desktop sharing, virtual meetings and more.
Plaxo - Plaxo offers toolbars for major email clients and web browsers (at least in Beta release) to keep your address book updated across all the applications that you use.
vflyer - Create a standardized classified ad that can be used online or in print.
GrandCentral - One phone number that will ring all of your phone lines and organize all of your voicemail into one mailbox.
Website Grader - How good at you at optimizing your website for Search Engines?
Lipsum Generator - Generate Latin filler text for mock-ups and story boarding websites
stock.xchng: Add photos to your writing or web design at low or no cost. stock.xchng provides tons of stock photos, many of them royalty-free.
MorgueFile: MorgueFile’s high resolution photos are has-beens in the stock photography world, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do a great job spicing up your work.
Designers Toolbox: Get set up with all the legal forms your design business may need with Designers Toolbox
Nolo: If you’ve got a legal question about your business, head to Nolo. Experts there offer legal advice for independent contractors and consultants.
Prosper: Using Prosper’s people-to-people lending website, you can borrow money for business expenses from real people. If you have extra cash, use Prosper to earn interest by lending to others.
MiddlePost Docs - Electronic signature services that allow you to get legally binding electronic signatures on your contracts.
IconnectE - Network with start-ups, small business owners, entrepreneurs, and others to create more business opportunities for yourself.
88 Miles - Unobtrusive time tracking that allows you to punch in and out of projects as you’re working, and includes on-screen timers that show you how much time you’ve clocked.
For Webdesigners - 295 helpful links for webdesigners
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