Real estate technology has come of age, aided by the housing boom combined the American obsession with real estate ans technology. The ability to find and match properties with consumers, to research and investigate properties are among the most logical extensions of new web technologies.

New web sites such as [Trulia](http://www.trulia.com) and [Zillow](http://www.zillow.com) are launched, have deep pockets, yet remain in beta, probably to difuse criticism of the vast promises they seem to be making to the consumer (and may fullfill those promises within a few years if they can last that long). Zillow provides property values and Trulia provides listings with very easy to follow interfaces.

Real estate blogs have evolved into the goto daily resources with a slew of ever changing real estate related topics. The king of real estate blogs, [Curbed]((http://www.curbed.com) who has been around just about the longest, is going national with localized market coverage areas. Curbed started out in New York, and has expanded to [Los Angeles](http://la.curbed.com) with about a half dozen other major markets coming down the pike. Big Media has begun to join the blog fray but is at a disadvantage since they cannot have the same edge to them that independent bloggers have. The New York Times blog [The Walk-Through](http://walkthrough.nytimes.com/) and Businessweek’s [Hot Properties](http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/) are among the best of them.

[Craigslist](http://www.craigslist.org), with its primitive interface, has proved that you don’t have to be pretty to be effective, has cost classified advertisers millions of dollars and continues to grow.

Earlier forays into online real estate services such as [Realtor.com](http://www.realtor.com) and [Realestate.com](http://www.realestate.com) remain oldschool and seem stuck in cluttered screen cram-down that overwhelms consumers with irrelevant information.

This whole technology movement is exciting and the possibilities are endless, _as soon as we get out of Beta._

One Comment

  1. Environmental Friendly February 13, 2006 at 11:52 pm

    I checked out trulia and zillow, and honestly was not too impressed with the content on their sites. The look and feel and navigation is good, but all in all the best listings of property are in New York Times – old faithful!! You just cannot beat content. NY Times is direct, simple, easy to navigate and has a ton of properties. I don’t understand how trulia and zillow can compete with it?

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