Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog

Yay! The powers that be have finally decided that we won’t all wither and die if Google Street View is allowed to take pics of our streets. Photo-mapping is set to be a big part of our future, especially in the online property space. Google will be obscuring people’s faces where they are captured in shot, which satisfies the Information Commissioner’s request for people to remain ’safe and private’. Because, let’s face it, being in the background shot of a photo map could lead to…erm what exactly? As The Guardian quite rightly points out…

“Google Street View is as much a threat to western civilisation as disposable cameras are to London’s historic monuments. The most viewed pictures on the US version of Street View include a giant pumpkin, two men leering at a woman bending over and the fractured signboard over a porn theatre.”

Prepare to see the Google car driving down a street near you soon.

There’s a new place to search for property online, at least in the US anyway. Oodle are now proudly powering a new classifieds section on MySpace. The new and improved listings section is aimed to be more social than your average classifieds experience, with users being able to post listings for free that then link back to their MySpace profiles. Users can take advantage of MySpace blogs and bulletins to then promote their listings to their friends or allow other users to search for their listings naturally.

As well as the listings that MySpace users post themselves, users will have access to all the ads posted across the Oodle network, which currently gets around half a million new listings a day. At the moment, less than 1% of MySpace users actually look at the classifieds section, but with the right promotion this could be an interesting rival to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist.

After all my whining that I wasn’t at Connect yesterday, I almost felt as though I was there thanks to the marvels of Twitter. Anyone that also wants to stay on top of the action should track the tag ‘#icsf‘ over at Summize, that way you won’t miss a tweet.

Zillow’s Drew Meyers has already written up a great post summarizing what went down at one of the morning panel sessions yesterday, the best gem to come from it seems to be from Linda Davis who (quite rightly) chimed…

“If you have a crappy business, a blog isn’t going to help.”

And whilst everyone is playing with real estate trading cards and getting excited about blogging at Connect, Trulia seem to be releasing their very own blogging platform. As reported by our gorgeous friends at AgentGenius, Trulia are (very quietly at this point) releasing their own blogging platform for agents that’s not a million miles away from what we’re used to seeing at ActiveRain. Is this going to crazily shake things up over in the US? We’ll have to wait and see. The usual concerns surrounding SEO and ownership of content are being aired in the comments sections of various posts covering the story but one thing is for sure, Trulia’s got consumer traffic…and tonnes of it.

This video is fantastic, it’s five minutes long and explains easily and succinctly how Google Analytics can help your property site. You NEED to be tracking your analytics if you have a property site, that way you can confidently answer questions like…

• How do people find you?
• Which sites are sending you the leads?
• What part of the world are your visitors in?
• What pages hold their attention?
• Which properties are getting the most hits?
• What browsers are your visitors using?
• Are your visitors converting into leads?

Big up to Trulia for putting the vid together.

p.s

If you’re getting this post via email, then you’ll need to click thru to the post to see the video…do it, it’s worth it!

Wow, $15 million dollars is certainly a nice way to start the weekend! And Trulia are thrilled to have closed their latest funding round with such pizazz. The US real estate search site has now raised a total of $33million in venture capital and this latest sum of cash was mainly led by Deep Fork Capital LLC, although previous investors Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Fayez Sarofim & Co also contributed.

What’s the money going to be spent on? I assume there’ll be some sort of party first but then Trulia will use this round of funding to further its development of new products and services for homebuyers, agents, brokers and advertisers and to expand their advertising services for the recently launched Trulia Advertising Network and self service offering, Trulia Pro.

Trulia CEO and co-founder, Pete Flint, had this to say…

“The housing slump has permanently altered how people search for real estate and their thirst for information, this additional capital will help us take advantage of this opportunity and continue our accelerated growth. This market is also a unique time to help real estate brokers and agents transition their marketing effort and services online. In the coming year we plan to roll out world class products that will continue to transform the online real estate experience.”

Mazeltov to y’all at Trulia, spend it wisely

They haven’t exactly launched with a bang (perhaps they’re in soft launch phase) but ASDA have become the latest supermarket with a property portal offering. I spend all day online and yet the first I heard of it was when our friends at PropertyOwl blogged about it, and they seemed surprised to come across it too. Maybe the big marketing push is to come, with estate agents patting their bottoms in the ASDA trademark fashion.

And it’s not just an online portal ASDA are tempting homeowners with, there’ll be ‘in-store display pods’ too. No clues on what they look like, but I imagine a nice big green egg with touch screens to flick through photos of local properties. Because people want to pick up their baked beans and next home at the same time, obviously.

How much it costs to sell with them is hazy, their website says…

“Contact us directly and we will pass your details to leading agents in your area to market your property locally, regionally and nationally for a sales fee of only 1% + VAT. Combined with special offers from leading conveyancers, HIP providers, removal firms and mortgage providers this all adds up to an “Asda moving price” service.”

I had a quick look at rentals, and couldn’t find any at all in London. Although there was a banner saying that rental properties would be uploaded to the site in ‘early June’. Maybe they mean early June 2009?

After the Tesco property portal fiasco it will be interesting to see how this one fares.

With all the hullabaloo about house prices, mortgage lending and moving costs at the moment, many are choosing to ‘improve’ rather than ‘move’. Finding the right professionals to do the work can be a daunting task, your friends may only have horror stories about their latest handyman, or they may have never had similar work done, or you may not even have any friends to even ask. Luckily, there may now be a solution to the age old task of finding a decent craftsman.

The Institute of Carpenters has launched “Find A Professional”, a new, free resource for searching for woodwork professionals. The search criteria includes location and various fields of craft such as carpentry, joinery, cabinet making, restoration work, education, furniture manufacture & repair and even expert witnesses, with the results drawn from the membership of the Institute of Carpenters. A certain level of skill and experience is required to be a member of the institute, so you should have better luck than just calling the first guy who’s put an ad up on the Tesco notice board.

To use “Find a professional” cick here.