Below are some of the highlights:

New ad publisher makes it even easier to create and manage your ads.

The new ad publishing page uses the flexible tab design so different aspects of the ad can be accessed easily. If for some reason a new post was not finished, a draft would be automatically saved and kept for up to 48 hours so you can always come back later and pick up from where you left.

More features added to each ad type

One big strength of FindMyRoof.com is the capability of presenting the customized information based on different ad types. In this release, we’ve enhanced this feature and added more property amenities. “Vacation rental” category sees the most changes in this area with a lot of additional features added, and hopefully this will be a great help for the property managers.

Enhanced interface

We have made some small look and feel tweaks to improve the site’s usability.

Google map street view is in

Google map street view has been covering more and more cities. It is such a nice tool and we don’t want our users to miss out on this one. A “view street map” link will be added to each ad and if the street map is available a cool camera view will be displayed side by side with the regular map to show a “virtual tour” of the street view.

More control over spam

It has become quite an issue now that scammers have been snatching legit ads online and turning them into scam bait. Maintaining the ad quality and controlling the spam have been the most important goals that we are constantly improving on.

There are a lot of other changes in this release and I’m not going to list all of them here. As always, suggestions and comments are welcome!

Cheers!

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

Cheers!

Time flies and 2008 is almost here. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone to support FindMyRoof.com. It has been a great year and we enjoyed the rapid growth and some nice media exposure as well. This is the best gift we received for the holiday season.

Going forward, we will continue provide the service that will truly benefit our users. I wish everyone happy new year!

No fluff, just listings.
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