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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This service allows agents and sellers to upload a classified ad, distribute it, and export to HTML or PDF to post on a website. The first step involves basic information any free service would request. For some reason they don’t require last name (?). They ask that you create an account name hosted by their server at vflyer.com. Such as mybiz.vflyer.com. The form detects in real-time if an account with that name has already been created.

After submitting the form they request that you check your email for a confirmation code. Probably to prevent spam. My gmail account didn’t consider it spam, which was helpful.

Next up you’re directed to a “create form” page in. They give your four steps, and they are indeed easy. Select a category for the classified ad, then fill in all the text forms in step two. You can “add attributes” by filling in a simple text field and checking that option.

Then it’s time to choose a template from 14. Oddly, the preview for each templates wasn’t working for me. Sometimes it did, but there was a long delay.

Once you’ve completed all the information, added attributes, uploaded pictures or created a gallery…it’s time to post. vFlyer lets you post to Oodle, Propsmart, Edgeio, Trulia, Googlebase, Vast, and Others. Others means that you want to add your flyer to all upcoming partners. This could be worded a little better – “Other” sounds as if you can select from a long list of second-tier online classified sites. Not sure why craigslist isn’t here, although I imagine it’s because craigslist likes to be different..

Next post will feature a sample and the final impression!