Some reality TV shows are getting into the real estate marketing business these days. The “Date my house” show on TLC helps homeowners to “dress up” their homes and invite the potential buyers to have a “date” with the house. Then, things like a dinner party or a friend and family gathering will be held so the buyers can really get a feel about doing these fun things in their potential future homes. “Sleep on it” on HGTV goes even further. In this show, a potential buyer can actually spend the night in the house to finding out more about the property and the neighborhood.

If you think about it, creative marketing strategy like these does make a lot of business sense. Today one can return almost anything back to a store if the goods is not satisfying or he(she) just simply changed his(her) mind. Why not having a trial period on a house too?

By spending a couple of days and nights in a potential future home, buyers should be able to find out more about:

• The property.
• The neighborhood and its surrounding areas.
• The actual noise level throughout the day and night.
• The commute to work since most people don’t really “test drive” on this.

I believe some serious potential buyers wouldn’t mind paying extra for a couple of days and nights staying in a house just to get familiar with the properties they are interested in and to see if they are indeed what they want.

Of course, there will be details or arrangement needed to be worked out for this kind of “date” to cover any risks and liabilities to the property. Similar contracts used by hotels may be used for this purpose. And a real estate agent will be an excellent facilitator for this to screen out potential buyers.

According to this report, 28% of young workers in UK can’t afford to buy first property. The reason? High mortgage cost and home price (even after the market has softened recently).

The report might try to paint a dim picture, but looking from the other side of the coin there are 72% of people who are able to afford a home, which doesn’t sound too bad. Homeownership is expensive no matter how cheap a house is. Adding all the mortgage payment, insurance, property tax and maintenance, it could be a major expense for one household.

Not sure if there is any stats available for United States. I’ll see if I can find it and publish it here.

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.