estate

Many of the nation's office and retail towers would use one-third less energy by 2012, if they meet goals set today by the Building Owners and Managers Association.

The group unveiled its plan at its annual conference in Manhattan to shrink the carbon emissions of some 9 billion square feet of commercial real estate, using the government's Energy Star benchmarks for energy and water usage. Green-building standards set by the nonprofit-run Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design are more stringent.

Still, this initiative, if successful, would significantly cut the $24 billion spent on energy each year by the … Read more

Imagine you are moving to a new city and you are considering different neighborhoods. If you want to find out if there are any cafes in a neighborhood, where the gas stations and post offices are, if there is a cinema nearby and what the crime is like, you typically have to consult multiple sources.

Not anymore. A new Web site set to launch on Tuesday called Terabitz offers all sorts of information in one place. The site is geared toward people looking for real estate, but it definitely will be helpful for a variety of purposes.

I recently moved … Read more

Zillow (previous coverage), a site for home buyers, sellers, and lookie-loos, is getting a broader focus today: on neighborhoods, not just houses. As such, it could become a resource for people neither selling or buying, but rather just living.

Neighborhoods now have their own pages, which include demographic info (I'm surrounded by lawyers who ride motorcycles, apparently) listings of homes for sale, and community features. There are discussion boards and neighbor directories, which could, theoretically, make Zillow a useful resource for people who live there. I'd find it useful, for example, if there was an active discussion board … Read more

Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.

Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to … Read more

The information age just got a little older, as the "birthplace of Silicon Valley" has been formally listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More specifically, this is 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, California: the garage where, in 1938, two guys named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started a company that became known as Hewlett-Packard the next year.

The new historic status is official as of Thursday. (You think it's been Zillowed?)

The house had been built circa 1905 and apparently once housed Palo Alto's first mayor; the garage, however, wasn't built until … Read more

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--If you're embarrassed about the value of your house on Zillow, don't fret. You can upgrade it.

The Web site, which tries to determine the value of houses and then serves up the data through its site, has a process in which users can add additional information about their homes that may not be reflected in the public records the company scours, according to Amy Bohutinsky, director of communications at the ThinkEquity Partners' Think Tomorrow Today conference taking place at Half Moon Bay, Calif. (not to be confused with the I Know You Are, … Read more

Only a few years ago, Crave spent more than $1,000 for a 1-megapixel camera that weighed more than a brick. Today, we'd probably be lucky to get $25 for it on Craigslist.

With the price of digital cameras dropping like broadcast celebrities, it makes sense that manufacturers try whatever they can to separate themselves from the pack, catering to specific types of consumers. But real-estate agents?

"RealPIX" is a camera designed specifically for agents and homeowners in need of a quick snapshot that captures as much house as possible in a single frame. It accomplishes this … Read more

Zillow is launching a few important community features on Wednesday. The sexy new addition is Home Q&A: Zillow will now let users ask questions about any property on the map. Anyone can answer them. Presumably, real estate agents will be the ones doing most of the answering, both to make homes sell more quickly and to appear knowledgeable to buyers who are interested in other properties they are representing. Homeowners, or anyone else for that matter, also can answer questions the community poses. All answers can be rated for helpfulness.

Home Q&A questions will appear on the Zillow front page, but at launch they won't be geographically targeted: you'll see a selection of all the questions on the system, not the ones relevant to your location. Zillow said it is moving toward launching a personalized home page, though.

The less sexy, but more important feature for the real estate industry, is Zillow's new user profile pages. Again, this will likely be populated by agents, since it's where all of a user's answers, questions, and helpfulness ratings will be aggregated. A buyer could get a pretty good feel for the knowledge and attitude of an agent on one of these user pages. The analysis on an agent won't be as deep as it would be with a rating tool like My-Currency (review), but since the community on Zillow is much larger and more engaged than on any upstart real estate site, it's still likely to be very useful. Zillow spokespersons estimate that of the site's four million visitors a month, 150,000 are agents. I don't think it will be too long before most of them set up user pages on Zillow, creating what is essentially a new directory of real estate agents -- but with user ratings attached to them.

There's also a fantastic new self-serve advertising system. I say fantastic because I'm tired of seeing Google's ads everywhere -- Google's service, while effective, isn't specialized for particular industries. Zillow's ad system will allow ZIP code-targeted advertising for agents, homes for sale, or local services companies, and the rates are reasonable: a penny a view, for a little ad with a graphic in it. (Zillow will still use Google ads for "fill-in," I was told.)

Finally, any user on Zillow can now flag a home as "for sale." That's something buyers' agents are likely to do, and it's a sneaky way to get around the fact that Zillow can't use the real estate industry's incumbent listing service, the MLS. After a home is flagged, the owner or agent can "take over" the listing, or, presumably, reverse it if the home is not in fact for sale.

Zillow is one of best examples of what Web 2.0 can be: It's got useful and unique data, it's fun and addictive to use, and with these changes it becomes even more of a community site. Plus, unlike most other Web 2.0 experiments, Zillow is becoming a central player in a market where there's real money changing hands.

More Zillow-supplied screenshots after the jump.

… Read more

My-Currency.com, launching at Demo 07 on Thursday, is a complicated solution to a very simple problem: people can't tell if real estate agents are any good.

My-Currency is designed to bust through friends' recommendations and real-estate advertising campaigns in order to help you find the agents with the best knowledge of their market, as shown by how well they predict the outcomes of real estate transactions.

The site is built around a prediction market. It asks agents to predict how much properties will sell for. Agents "wager their reputation," and put in their predicted sales price … Read more