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.

FindMyRoof.com has just released some enhancements this past week and here are the highlights:

Save your findings - If you like an ad, you can save it on your browser right away under the “saved” page. This is a cool feature for you to keep track of what you have been finding and are interested in.

Share your ad - We’ve added the capability to easily bookmark your posted ad, save it on Del.icio.us, and to share it on social network site such as Facebook.com. The ultimate goal is to get more people to see your ad; by sharing it on your Facebook profile, it could be a great way to let all your friends, and friends of friends to see it.

The “My Ads” page has been redesigned to help users view their ads in a category-list format. This is especially good for users who post large quantity of ads. And an ad counter has been placed there for ad posters to know exactly how many ad slots that are available to them. You’ll like all these enhancements.

Cheers!

Hello everyone,

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.
FindMyRoof

FindMyRoof blog is listed in Technorati now.

Technorati Profile

FindMyRoof.com released its latest update last night and it is a major release for our team within the past 6 months.

Here are some of the highlights in this release:

1. We have eliminated the category pages and the bread crumb on each page. The newly introduced navigation bar will provide users an easier and quicker way to navigate through the site. Now visitors can go into the property listing with just one click on the main menu, then can further narrow down the selection by choosing the property type, geographic location, and property features on the same page.
2. The newly improved Google map features show visitors all essential information on the spot if one clicks on a specific property.
3. There are some cosmetic changes as well to enhance user experience on our site.

How do you like these new changes? Good? Bad? Ugly? Feel free to drop us a line.

FindMyRoof application is on FaceBook.com now. If you have a FaceBook account, you can go directly to this URL to add the FindMyRoof application to your profile:

FindMyRoof Application on FaceBook

The application is created to give FaceBook users an easy way to access the real estate listings on FindMyRoof.com. Whether you are renting or buying, searching properties on FindMyRoof.com is right at your fingertips.

Great news for FindMyRoof.com users!

Now we have added the FindMyRoof.com forum for our users to ask questions, share experience and help each other. With our growing user base, it becomes more and more important to have a platform for our users to interact and share information with each other. The FindMyRoof.com Community Forum will help us achieve that goal.

Our forum features different categories and boards for users to post questions and seek answers. You can send us suggestions or comments by posting directly on our forum. And you can also post or find useful local information on your home state board.

You, the FindMyRoof.com users, are the ones who make this site better each day. We hope you will enjoy using this site and become a part of this community!