Jeremy Brandt

Edgeio Real Estate Listings

Edgeio launched last week - a service that crawls real estate web sites and blogs to aggregate listings.

It was founded by RealNames founder Keith Teare and TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington.  The site uses RSS and XML to collect content from various web sites based on tags and then displays them online.

The process is fairly simple.  You tag your listings with keywords and Edgeio will index them along with other keywords.

The concept is interesting, although the future for "content aggregators" like this is in question.  The market is only so large for companies who rely entirely on content from other people, although this is essentially what Google, Yahoo and the search engine companies do.

Tags:Listing edgeio

Zillow Part 2

Looks like Zillow may be having a few issues, turns out a lot of people were waiting to see what they would launch and they served up over 300,000 pages between midnight & 7am.

How do you think this will effect companies like HouseValues, that get almost all of their revenue from lead generation for agents by enticing home sellers to inquire what their property value is and selling it to an agent?

Zillow.com > Real Estate Comps

Zillow.com finally launched in "beta test" mode yesterday with free home valuation estimates and data on over 60 million homes in the US.

This is the long awaited of often speculated about business started by Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, the online travel giant.  Barton has raised over $32 million for Zillow to date.

Zillow's business model is based on advertising, although I believe that will change to focus on lead generation along the lines of HouseValues and RealEstate.com once they reach critical mass.

The interface for Zillow is very easy to use, and real estate investors may find it of particular interest, allowing them to run quick comps to ballpark the value of a property before investigating further.