PluggedIn: Real estate Web sites boom, despite market slump

By Euan Rocha

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Home buyers and home sellers alike can find more innovative and useful features than ever on real estate Web sites, which are nimbly adapting to the U.S. housing slump.

For those poking around the real estate market, it might be worthwhile to check out sites like buysiderealty.com, iggyshouse.com, zillow.com and trulia.com to see just how much online home shopping has changed lately.

In the past, most real estate sites primarily offered property listing services. That's no longer the case thanks to improved online mapping services and the spread of broadband connections, which have allowed sites to take advantage of new technology.

What's more, as a means to drum up business, real estate sites have looked to expand their features to include services like alerts, "heat maps" showing active sales areas, video postings, home estimates and Q&A forums. Some are even offering rebates to home buyers.

Chuck Cole, for instance, recently bought a home in Oakland, California, worth almost $450,000 -- and met his realtor just once through the entire month-long process.

Cole used the multiple listing service tool on buysiderealty.com to pick the properties he wanted to visit. Later, after deciding on a house and submitting an offer, he had a realtor from buysiderealty.com handle the transaction.

For doing all the groundwork himself and bypassing a traditional realtor, Cole was rewarded with a rebate of over $8,000, or 75 percent of the buyer's commission that buysiderealty.com earned from the deal.

"We liked that everything was done pretty much by e-mail and phone. When we've worked with realtors in the past it was a big pain in the neck to try to connect with people in person and to have to go to their office," said Cole.

MARKET SLUMP SPURS BOOM

If you're looking to sell your house without using a real estate agent, consider a visit to iggyshouse.com, a sister concern of buysiderealty.com.

The site lures sellers with freebies like a multiple listing service, a listing on realtor.com and posts on other sites. Home sellers once paid agents a premium for such services.

Iggyshouse.com also lets sellers and real estate agents post photographs, videos and details about the property for sale -- at no cost.

"With 75 or 80 percent of sellers (also) being buyers, we know that if we give them this free service and they are self directed enough to sell on their own, there is a pretty good chance that they'd want to use (the) buyside," said Joe Fox, chief executive of iggyshouse.com and buysiderealty.com.

"We're basically giving a free service to educate consumers about another service that pays them to use it and that's exactly what is happening today," said Fox.

Another Web site that has entered this increasingly crowded space is zillow.com, which launched in early 2006. It not only offers free property listings, but also gives away a home valuation service it calls Zestimate.