It’s been a while between drinks but I am hopefully back with more regular posts about what we are up to here at Homethinking.

To date, Homethinking has been a place for Realtors to showcase their skills and experience to more than a quarter of a million home owners searching for an agent to work with each month.

Tens of thousands of Realtors have claimed and edited their profile. But after that there wasn’t much else to do. Now we want to help agents manage their listings in one central place and have it syndicated out to places like Trulia, Zillow and most of all from what we are finding, Craigslist. All completely free.

Users land on clean, uncluttered landing pages that have one goal in mind: increasing the conversion rate of browsers to interested buyers. You can see an example of a listing page here.

We are not delusional in that there are already a lot of great services like Postlets and VFlyer out there that help Realtors syndicate their listings to many different sites. What I believe we can help improve is the analytics and measurement of your marketing efforts. And we intend to be completely transparent as to the conversion rates of various designs and employ designers and landing page experts to constantly help optimize and improve this metric for you.

If you don’t already have an account (it’s free) why not create one now or for existing users login here. Also, I’d love to hear your thoughts. If you are an existing user and want us to improve the service in any way, I’d love to hear from you. You’re comments will be handed directly to our development team and make a difference.

During a downturn, new business can be tough to find – if you don’t try new things. It’s an excellent time to tap into new markets and Homethinking’s Neighborhood site can help you out by giving you a platform to reach out to relocators. Here are a few reasons why it’s a no-brainer to give it a try:

1. Recession or Not, Relocators Need to, well, Relocate

   The relocation market is more immune to downturns because many of those relocating are doing so out of necessity whether it be a job, school, or family related. These potential clients mean serious business and often have aggressive timelines.

2. Credibility is as Important as Ever

   Online sales pitches don’t work. Neither does trolling social network sites for business. What does work is gaining a potential client’s trust by showing off intimate local knowledge. Homethinking gives you the platform to show off just how knowledgeable you are by writing neighborhood reviews. A person faced with the daunting task of relocating needs help any way they can get it. Showing off your local knowledge is a great way to earn their business.

3. We Get the Ball Rolling for You

   By giving relocators a guide to the city their soon call home, we are equipping them with more information than ever before. Informed clients is good for you, isn’t it? You can spend your time finding them the perfect home rather than explaining the lay of the land.

4. It’s Free!

   I saved the best for last: adding reviews is completely free so you’ve got nothing to lose! Get Started right now!

The aim of RealEstateVocies, an often neglected side-project of ours, is to help new real estate bloggers achieve a voice and get traffic to their blog.

In a corollary to that aim, today, we launched our very own Webring! You can join the RealestateVoices.com webring at http://www.realestatevoices.com/webring/ and drive additional readers to your blog and help your search engine ranking.

What is the RealestateVoices webring?

A webring is a collection of like-minded sites who agree to display a graphic on their site. When a user clicks on the graphic they are taken to another site belonging to the same webring.

We’ve taken the concept and added a few twists.

Firstly, you get what you give. You can’t join, put the badge on your site initially and then take it down straight away and hope to get other people to link to you. We count the impressions and clicks your graphic generates and then we link to your site on other members of the network accordingly. That is, if you generate lots of impressions and clicks, you’ll be shown and linked to more frequently in other areas of the network.

Secondly, most webrings do not give the sites benefit in search engines. If you follow the world of “search engine optimization” then you know that a large factor in how well you rank on Google is the number and quality of the sites that link to you. In a webring, the links coming to your site are run through something called a 302 redirect link. That basically means the links are worth nothing.

For the RealEstateVoices webring, all the links running through a 301 redirect, which Google treats the same as a static link. What all that means is that you will receive search engine benefit from the webring.

Join the Webring now at http://www.realestatevoices.com/webring/

Today, we at Homethinking are proud to announce the launch of neighborhoods.homethinking.com. Here’s the full press release. I’d also like to take a second and introduce myself. My name is Alex Mather and I am joining Niki Scevak and his Homethinking.com team as the new Product Manager.

What Makes it Different (and Useful)

While other sites give statistics on each neighborhood (Redfin, Trulia, and Zillow are great at this.) This data is useful (especially concerning schools and market trends), but from afar it’s still tough to really understand the neighborhood.

Imagine if we just designed a new fruit, we can spout out all of the data on it: 53% sour, 20% sweet, pH level of 2.2, citric acid levels, size in centimeters, it’s color, etc. You’d know a lot about the fruit but you wouldn’t know what it would taste like, would you? Now, imagine if we said our new fruit is like a lemon but bigger and sweeter, you’d know a lot more. Heck, your mouth might even water. (Example inspired by Made to Stick.)

Learning a new city by comparing its neighborhoods to the neighborhoods of a city you know well will allow you to get a feel for a new city quickly and easily.

How We Compared Neighborhoods

From our website:

Neighborhoods scores are initially calculated using demographic data from the US Census and other public sources. Wide numbers of demographic factors, such as age, marital status, whether the household has kids or not and the frequency of arts and culture activities, among other variables, were compared. The scores are then refined over time by reviews from people just like you.

Obviously, data only tells part of the story. We think of data as a starting point and that user reviews will eventually be the primary way we compare neighborhoods.

Calling All Agents!

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that 38% of movers (over 16 million) moved to a different county including 19% that moved to another state!

Are you a real estate agent with an intimate knowledge of more than one city? This is your chance to show off your expertise – for free! Here are all of the ways you can get exposure:

1. Free exposure when you compare neighborhoods.
2. Top reviewers in each city get free exposure on city pages.
3. Premier exposure for all pages in a specific cities by paying to be featured for specific zip codes.

We all know the CAR statistic that 69% of people hire the first agent the communicate with. If you’re interested in being noticed by some of the 16 million people moving counties each year, this is your chance!

There’s More to Come

We’re just getting started in our efforts to make relocating easy so stay tuned for more features. We look forward to your feedback.

Step right up to CoRE 99. On the the eve of the 100th birthday of the carnival of real estate, things are looking grim in most major metropolitan real estate markets with great pressure being exerted by the collapsing mortgage market and the dire straits Fannie and Freddie now find themselves in.

The always sage Dan Green got this week’s pic with an incisive look at the worsening conditions for home buyers looking to obtain a mortgage and another potential freezing of the mortgage market as the Government prepares to intervene and create stability.

Brad Inman didn’t nominate himself for the Carnival but I liked his historical look at the secondary mortgage market so much I just had to mention it. The article describes how the secondary market began and now that it has been given a Monty Python flesh wound, his predictions for what will happen next. Including: “Home sellers will become active lenders, but only those who have equity. Seller financing will help some transactions.”

From the serious to the not so serious. Spencer Rascoff traces down a phantom telephone pole installer and explains your rights in such a situation. Marc Grayson suspects that this ‘just listed’ property brimming with holiday trimmings and winter language may not be so just listed. And Cindy Jones explains just how far some clients are willing to go to view a property (hint: it may not be legal in all 50 states).

And be sure to check back at the Carnival of Real Estate site who looks like they’ll be hosting the big 1-0-0 next Monday!

Today we drew the curtain back on mortgage.homethinking.com. Mortgage.homethinking.com allows you to see top local lenders by market share and to assess the risk of the subprime mortgage crisis in your county. For Realtors and Mortgage Brokers who blog, they can also embed the charts in their own posts to support opinion or analysis.

Why would someone want to look through 33 million mortgage records? If you are refinancing your mortgage you can see the exact market share of lenders in your area and also find information on the conditions under which mortgages were obtained, like the average amount borrowed.

More topically today, you can see how many subprime mortgages were undertaken in a particular area in 2006. 2006 is important as many subprime loans reset in 2 years and will do this year. They can act as a forward predictor of more foreclosures (and hence more downward pressure on real estate prices in that area).

Or the data can show exactly the opposite. For instance here is Manhattan in New York:

As you can see it barely was touched by subprime loans in 2006.

This is just the start but in the near future we’ll be adding:

- 2004 and 2005 data (we actually had to order the data from an obscure library in DC)

- Better lender navigation so you can traverse the mortgage lending of a particular lender more easily

- An free API into all of this data to help support or disprove a hypothesis around mortgage lending

- More and in depth data around loan performance. The HMDA data is the total universe but unfortunately it’s released in September of the following year (so 2007 data will be released in 5 months or so and will hit Homethinking soon after).

What other ideas are we missing? How can we improve? Let us know your feedback in the comments or drop us a line at feedback at homethinking dot com

We think all the time about how we can notice and build real estate reputation and knowledge on a wide scale. One thing that had grabbed our attention was a concept called prediction markets: where individuals would buy or sell units of an outcome. Collectively, the markets would be able to predict the future, or at least be a real time representation. The concept is not new: the stock market is effectively the world’s largest prediction market.

What we thought to do, however, is put a twist on process and achieve two things: one is to see if we can as a group predict real estate outcomes accurately but the other is to notice the individuals making the predictions and using the fact if they were right or wrong in our real estate agent search results.

What does that mean? Basically if you, as a real estate agent, predict the correct outcome for the price of homes in your local area, you will see your ranking in our search results for that area improve over time.

Having your pulse on home price trends and being able to offer that as advice to clients is, we think, one of the most important roles of a real estate agent. And that’s why we launched our Homethinking prediction markets this morning.

How does it work? Initially we thought to predict prices on a county level, and to set the end for the predictions at the end of the year. We’ve created markets for around 100 of the top counties. For instance, here is the market for Homethinking’s HQ in Manhattan, New York. If you’d like us to add your local area, just say so in the comments and we promise to add the market in the next day.

Does it cost anything to make predictions? Nope. The service is integrated into our Realtor Console. So if you are a real estate agent, you can either login to your existing Homethinking profile or if you don’t have one, create a profile.

After you login you should see something like this:

Where the markets have been filtered down into the ones we think are relevant to you, or alternatively you can just browse them all by topic.

What if I am not a real estate agent? You can still participate to. Just you wont be linked to our search results. You can sign up for a non-agent account here.

How will the markets be judged? At the end of each market, the final price will be set by looking at the median sales price of a residential home in that area, as determined by our friends at Trulia, a real estate search engine. Each market has a link to the relevant Trulia page, as well.

That’s it from here. I (Niki Scevak) am here in San Francisco for the Inman Connect conference. So stop by and say hi. And as I said earlier, if you’d like your local area to be added, just let us know in the comments and we’ll be sure to add it right away. We’ll also keep adding markets over the coming weeks and months to build out our coverage.

p.s. Still interested in reading more? Here is an old fashion press release we put out.

This week we had the pleasure of being a host judge for the excellent Project Blogger initiative the folks at Active Rain and Inman have been running over the past few months.

And so how to judge? Naturally I am subjective toward a few things in real estate and blogging: compelling, short, sharp writing, the use of data to back up well thought through arguments and the elusively defined mix of passion and personality.

One of the participants Tisza Major-Posner brought up some great points in the judging of project blogger changing week to week. I read through the previous judges’ takes and tried to keep the themes consistent but you may get what you pay for.

Without further ado, my top 5:

1. Jackie Colson-Miller – A fantastic cocktail of posts relating to Tampa’s attractions and real estate conditions. Also, using the blog to raise awareness and money for charities is a particularly good idea. Post regarding Tampa prices versus the experiences of Florida overall could have been made more personal with anecdotes from recent experiences in home transactions.

2. Theresa Lussier – A fantastic idea in entering and documenting a client’s remodeling project for a competition was one of my favorite posts of the week – demonstrating how social media is fantastic and unique. And the proof was in the pudding: a local home owner who found the post through Google and now is an engaged reader. One minor point: the link in the post to a previous entry about the house seemed to be broken.

3. Ines HegedusGarcia – A very nicely structured blog and one of the better ones at communicating it’s purpose and integrating within the wider site (some blogs are islands away from the property search functions). Market conditions post was frank and honest, and consumers will no doubt appreciate that. The city-profile post on El Portal has the makings of something great, although it was a little too search engine focused. A video interview with residents might make a good compliment.

4. Kevin Tomlinson – Fantastic post on the Canyon Ranch condo project although it was only one of two posts for the week. The blog is nicely designed and clean and conveys credibility.

5. Julie Ferenzi – Clear and passionate connection to the community mixed in with a few locally-focused resource-type posts that will feature well in the search engines over time. Switching brokerage’s post on Active Rain blog begged for a consumer-translated edition for the main blog and the tone of the main blog should be balanced with more real estate related posts vs community happenings.

And the other participants:

Mary PopeHandy – A nice mix of community related posts with the Microclimate post being especially thoughtful. A more conversational tone with the posts might spur greater discussion – post more questions from homeowners, concerns and issues on their mind that might have a wider applicability etc.

Tisza MajorPosner – Tisza raised some great points around the judging of Project Blogger in her Active Rain blog. In a recursive way though, her best post of the week was about Project Blogger. I’d agree with Mike’s comments of a few weeks back: let your personality shine through on your route 66 living blog and good things will surely come of it.

Vali Wimberly – Nice use of the photo slide show in the Inca 29 post, although the post itself might benefit from being more conversional and opinionated in tone. Where are the best value units? How does the complex compare to others in the area? How should buyers contact you to see the houses?

Welcome – dear readers – to the 43rd edition of the carnival of real estate. This week thirty nine entries flowed into our inbox and of which, five made it through our highly biased opinion filter of excellence.

The mostly-poisonous reaction to a highly-favorable 60-minutes piece on online real estate brokerage startup Redfin permeated throughout a lot of this week’s entries. Broker Bryant provided not only an excellent recount of the coverage but also looked at the root cause as to why Redfin is gaining attention and a solution dear to my heart. Specifically, there are too many agents in the industry which causes a variable level of service and allows a few bad apples to tarnish the reputation of an industry of professionals that are on the whole good. And his solution? Making it harder to become a Realtor and lifting the bar on admission. I couldn’t agree more.

Along the lines of promoting solutions rather than lonely-criticism-without-recommendation, our favorite post of the week came from Athol Kay of RE Agent in CT. Athol proposes that instead of Realtors simply criticizing Zillow’s zestimates, they put their words of attack in context. Every comment around the accuracy of a Zestimate should be accompanied by something like “When I do a CMA I get within 5% of an actual sales price 90% of the time”. As Athol concludes “Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts.”

Now, back to Redfin. Hot on the heels of the 60 minutes segment, the NWMLS fined the company $50,000 because its “Sweet Digs” property review blog broke a rule barring an agent to “advertise” another agent’s listing without their express permission. Greg Swann, of Bloodhound Blog, had the best analysis of the event, including both a history of the rule’s intent and secondly around the definition of advertising.

Greg points out the rule is a legacy from the times of ‘sub-agency’ and effectively prevents a buy-side agent from representing the interests of the home buyer. And then, the extremely long-bowed interpretation that a review of a property is an advertisement. I am not sure what the editorial gatekeepers of media properties around the world would say about that.

Jim Cronin of the Real Estate Tomato kicked off an interesting experiment around collaborative editing. The endeavor hopes to take a look at the mechanics of Real Estate teams – both from a business perspective and a blogging one. The post already has a number of good comments, and be sure to add yours before tomorrow (Tues, 22nd May).

Finally, Peter Comitini of the Corcoran Group has an excellent article on the weird and wonderful world of Manhattan real estate, and specifically on buying an apartment in new condominium projects that are sprouting up along the west side of Manhattan.

Not in New York and thinking about what you’re missing out on? How about a 10% deposit for a floorplan, 2 year wait, higher closing costs and risks? The onerous terms are a by product of surging prices and demand in Manhattan. If we didn’t need more evidence that Manhattan is a world into itself, there’s some more. And a brief shout out to Sean Black of Trulia who is among the happy many about to move into a new condo project in Manhattan.

That’s all from me. Next week’s carnival is hosted by the North Fulton County RE Blog.

A lot of the improvements we have been working on Homethinking in recent months had to do with the Realtor side of things. So we’re pleased to announce today the introduction of property pages on Homethinking.

Property pages aren’t listing pages but instead answer two simple questions: is the listing price high or low (as compared to Zillow‘s estimate) and should you buy the house or would you be better off renting it (according to housemath.us calculations).

Here’s a sample:

And here’s a link to a page about a home in Phoenix, Arizona. We hope you enjoy and if you have any suggestions as to how we should make it better – let us know (feedback at homethinking dot com)!