Trulia’s just released the Snapshot.

Trulia, is one of the real estate search engines that indexes property listings from various sites and presents them to users.

My first impression on the new Trulia Snapshot was “Wow, this is cool, a map with a slider and bouncy boxes, and it brings the online map up a notch”. But once that initial novelty wore off, I started to wonder how useful this would really be to the customers. One common problem to use a map to show real estate listings is that there would be too many properties crammed into a small space that makes the whole map look too “busy” to actually find anything. I can see the Snapshot is trying to present the property in a better way so it will stand out, but I don’t think the sliding and dragging to locate something really improves the usability that much.

Still, this is a nice looking tool and quite an eye candy. Hopefully it will evolve into something special.

For those of you who don’t know MLS, it stands for Multiple Listing Service. It is a database created by National Association of Realtors (NAR) to host the home for sale records. It was created for collaboration among the real estate agents and an agent can login to MLS to list or find homes for clients. However it was restricted to the online brokers since most of the online brokers are also “discount brokers” and charge much lower fees than the existing commission rate. Now it has changed, as explained on Techcrunch.com.

Personally I think this is a good thing for the industry. In today’s world, it is just not a sustainable business model to compete by withholding information and hoping the customer has no other choice but stick to the service. The real estate market will eventually recover, and what comes along are the changes happening in the service provided by the real estate agent. Redfin is the pioneer, and there will certainly be more.

Updated:

Here is the official announcement from Department of Justice.

In the past couple of weeks we have released new community features in FindMyRoof.com. The FindMyRoof community aims to provide more real estate related news and information which ultimately benefit our users. Focal Point is our aggregated news section which provides the latest news and best stories that picked by our users. The forum is where you can share the local city/town information and discussion is encouraged. If you own a real estate related business, you can submit your profile on REACH.

All in all this is just a small step toward our goal to provide our users a better tool and platform to share the knowledge and I hope you enjoy it.

Sometimes we get emails from our user asking whether the number of views on their ad is available. The answer is “yes” and “no”. We do record the view count for a page but the data is very raw. What I mean is that when a page is hit by someone, this “someone” can be a real person, a search engine bot, or even a a bot from scrappers or spammers. So the count is pretty meaningless in terms of revealing how many times an ad has been viewed by a real person. It will be a quite expensive process to filter the hit to make the total count closer to the actual human page views so we decide not to include this feature, at least for now.