Avot Media is working with Home Depot to provide in-store “how to” videos for certain Home Depot product lines.

Here’s an even better use of this technology:

1. A home buyer drives by a house in a neighborhood they like, and takes a flyer.
2. On the flyer (or the box if the agent forgot to refill it), is a text number.
3. The person, an avid American Idol fan, knows how to text.
4. They text to the number, and receive a video link.
5. Assuming their phone can handle non-proprietary video, and many do (except that elegant iphone), they watch a video tour of the home.

Or they could just start with Cell Trust,although their products appear to introduce far more feature bloat.

Popularity: 66% [?]

So Trulia has incorporated Google maps’ Street view into their listings. Here’s an example from a listing in Portland. It’s not exactly a tour of the home. In fact, you can hardly see the home from the street, but it does give you an opportunity to tour the neighborhood without driving to it.

I’m sure that Trulia would like to have a street view for Eugene as well. Unfortunately Google has focused almost all of its Oregon-based Street View photography efforts on Portland, as you can see from this map. If that changes, and Eugene gets Street View images, you will be the first to know!

Popularity: 83% [?]

This is why Zillow is in the game.

Not only are owners (or agents) posting homes for sale before they’re for sale, adding to liquidity AND an even stronger buyer’s market (buyers, that means you need to BUY), but people are also posting homes for less than the Zestimate that shows up right next to the make me move price. That’s either brilliant, or really dumb. Either way..you’ve got to be impressed by the sheer number of “Make me Move” homes that are now listed in Zillow.

Popularity: 42% [?]

These days a lot of people spend time thinking about the value of their home.

Zillow provides homeowners with a statistical margin of error for each county in the nation. For Lane County, their Zestimated Median Margin of Error is 8.2%.

Since Zillow is such an easy to use home valuation resource for owners, most owners would be wise to take advantage of their Create Your Own Estimate toolset to improve upon the accuracy of those Zillow estimates. Owners can make recommendations based on home improvements and different comparable homes.

While Zillow is still a young organization, and their estimates are imperfect, they are following data that appraisers have been using for years, albeit with a much wider margin of error.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Fotowoosh is a fascinating new service. It takes the real estate online “tour” to a whole new level.

What I’m not clear on however is:

• How much work is put into rendering a photo into a video? Is it self-service, or not?
• Is this simply a clever lead generation tool for their hosting service?

Freewebs is definitely on the cutting edge of Web 2.0, with their simplified application tools for either integrating content into your own site or blog, or into a blog hosted by Freewebs.

They definitely understand, unlike other internet hosting services, that hosting has become a commodity. It’s what publishers can do with the hosting that drives innovation. In this case, they might be onto something with fotowoosh. If they send me a beta [nudge nudge], I might be able to tell you.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Mapwing is a no-frills, easy-to-use virtual tour host. You can create a basic floor plan, leave notes, and allow people to tour inside and outside of the property using the “flashlight” compass on the floorplan.

This is a very clean site with an excellent product. I look forward to the day (if it comes), when they provide an API so others can mash their tours with MLS, Google maps, and other resources to build a better real estate mousetrap. Pardon the phrase.

Mapwing should be especially appealing to builders, who can create tours for popular home designs and embed them directly into their websites.

Popularity: 13% [?]

I like to see technology companies in Oregon thrive, so here’s a little plug for a company in Fall Creek Oregon called Insite Virtual Tours

Here’s what they did for the Campbell House. Obviously the Cambpell House isn’t for sale, so not entirely focused on the buying and selling homes, but that’s ok. They claim to limit the fish-eye factor, something that the market can definitely use, although I noticed a little fish-eye business going on. It’s probably the nature of 360′ views to give you a little of that no matter how flat the lens.

$100-200 to “merchandise” a home worth $300k or more seems like a no-brainer. Provided the marketing costs don’t add up too quickly! A good enough reason to put together a Marketing Plan.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Megan over at Trulia alerted me today to two new products they’ve released - Local Heatmaps, just what it describes, and Trulia Trends, a PDF showing the latest pricing trends for MLS listings, year-over-year as of Jan 07.

The new heatmap charts are fantastic and definitely deserve to be blogrolled. I especially like that for the week ending Jan 3rd, Lane County is the most popular location for home searches on Trulia.

As I’ve mentioned before, I especially like the neighborhood growth data by week. This can give buyers or sellers useful information. Especially if a neighborhood appreciates at double-digit rates for longer than 6-9 months, and continues that trend with the latest weekly data. Or in the case of buyers, if the latest weekly data shows a significant decline in price.

Popularity: 17% [?]