SAN FRANCISCO -- Dale Stinton, CEO for the National Association of Realtors, on Wednesday addressed some aggressive new initiatives planned by the trade group and its affiliated Realtor.com property-search site, and also discussed the subprime lending debacle.

Stinton, who spoke at the Real Estate Connect San Francisco real estate conference, said, "If there ever was a case study for banks staying out of real estate it's the subprime market." He also said that the subprime situation is an example of the "inevitability of an open society," "of going too far, too fast," and "of liquidity in the marketplaces. We're not so proud of the fact that some (homeowners) now are struggling and might be losing their homes or going into foreclosure."

He noted that the association's directors approved a multi-million-dollar investment in a new technology enterprise (see related article) and that the association is also planning to reach out more to consumers through a Web site and other efforts.

Stinton acknowledged that NAR-affiliated Realtor.com "is playing catch up" with some other sites though the site is evolving technologically and "once we catch up we're not going to fall behind again."

He was mum about the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against NAR and bashed the "60 Minutes" news segment on real estate commissions as more entertainment than news.

Joel Singer, president of real estate business services for the California Association of Realtors trade group, said during an earlier session at the conference that Realtor groups are moving in the right direction when it comes to multiple listing service reform.

"It's absurd that there are 800 MLSs. It imposes cost and it imposes technological inefficiencies that ultimately are going to be opening opportunities for other competitors, frankly."

"I do think the national organization is getting there," he said, and the state association is working toward MLS reform, too.

Singer acknowledged that there are obstacles. "The brokerage industry to a large degree has ceded too much power to the agents. Once you have entrenched power ... more importantly, once you have entrenched economic power -- the economics are that the MLSs actually have more funding than the organized real estate itself -- it becomes very difficult to overcome that."

Rich Barton, founder of real estate valuation and marketing site Zillow.com, shared the stage with Stinton and said he envisions the real estate marketplace will become like a public market in Seattle -- "I see an old-style marketplace formed, a city market like Pike Place Market. I actually dug up an old photo -- Pike Place Market at the turn of the last century. People were gesticulating. People were buying things. People were gossiping. Negotiations were happening. Big billboards were advertising things above the marketplace. That's the picture I have in my head."

He also said that he believes that Apple's iPhone represents an era of new mobile innovation, and that Zillow plans to roll out mobile tools. "This could be the shot heard round the world for the next era," he said.

The influx of technology entrepreneurs who are building new real estate 2.0 applications will take off. The recent launches of SecondSpace and Terabitz demonstrate a new appetite by VC-backed techies to conquer a vertical that has massive revenue appeal. Last week, I participated in the Meshwalk, a Silicon Valley networking forum for startup entrepreneurs, and more than a few of the Web 2.0 startup leaders I spoke with mentioned that the real estate industry was one possible target for their new applications.

Real estate has been down this route before. The industry historically looked at the Internet suspiciously as a provider of free real estate data that threatens to disintermediate its practitioners. The initial appearance of Real Estate 1.0 lead generation companies like HomeGain and even NAR-affiliated Realtor.com are manifestations of the brokerages' lack of foresight in developing applications that would connect its agents with the consumer.

SecondSpace is a good example of a company that is developing a search engine-based technology that aims to deliver fine-tuned search results based on compiling users' lifestyle queries. Real estate happens to be one of the best verticals in which to launch their first sites because real estate purchases are all about lifestyle... the grand plan is to develop lifestyle Web sites for other verticals such as travel or even fishing that would complement each other in a portfolio. It's an original model.

The tech world as a whole still doesn't understand the arcane world of real estate (*see footnote below). To bridge the two worlds, I'll be writing a series of articles explaining search engine marketing as it relates to real estate over at Search Engine Journal. The first is up today... all about why real estate blogging is the first manifestation of Real Estate 2.0  and how the agent and the consumer will begin to make their direct connections online.

(*Pardon the plug, but this week's Inman Connect San Francisco is where all the techies come to learn about real estate, ask my friends Pete Flint and Oliver Muoto).

--Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate

Here's some Web food for real estate bargain hunters:

ZipRealty just announced on their blog that they've added a button on their Web site that enables consumers to search for "short sales". Users can create searches that enable them to either include, exclude or only search for short-sale property listings.

Side note: I haven't seen a lot of short sales in the areas where I've been searching for homes (entry-level San Francisco 'hoods), but what I have seen is a lot of price reductions on ZipRealty. About 8 in 10 listings within my search criteria carry this label. This is in step with what many of the experts have been saying, that the entry-level markets have slowed the most due to a dry up of available credit to first-time buyers who are normally strapped for cash.

At the same time, though, I have one friend who's been repeatedly outbid on homes in San Francisco over the last couple of months. Not only is real estate local, it's entirely unique and subjective.

Who says home buyers and sellers should have all the online geek fun? Renters are getting their share of nerdy tools too. For those San Francisco residents priced out of the housing market (or just too confused to buy right now), a self-described bored coder who's been apartment hunting created CraigStats, a rental data/Google mashup extravaganza. (Hat tip to CurbedSF for the find.)

The creator warns that some of the Google map overlays only work in Firefox. The database comes solely from craigslist.

Why do this? After dealing with a shady landlord whose house was going into foreclosure, CraigStat's creator broke the lease and went hunting - only to find that "everything that used to be for rent was now for sale due to the same foreclosure effect that happened to my landlord…It also appeared that the rents were going up …. but …were they really? Or am I just paranoid and bitter?"

Richard A. Smith, president of Realogy Corp., the largest brokerage company in the U.S., dropped a bomb on the newspaper industry this week when he told Bloomberg News that the Coldwell Banker and Century 21 branding budgets for newspapers will shrink by as much as two-thirds next year from 2006. (See Bloomberg's exclusive.)

The company intends to slash its newspaper advertising budget to 70 percent of its home-sale ad spend by 2010, down from 84 percent this year, Bloomberg reported, as it shifts more ad dollars online. "It's going to be bloody...The newspaper industry is going to have to adjust," Smith told Bloomberg.

The move should come as no surprise to the newspaper industry, which has struggled with waning advertising revenues in each of its classified categories -- real estate, automotive and jobs. (See Inman News special report, "Stop the presses: What the shift to online real estate means for print media.")

What is somewhat perplexing here is that while all the fingers seem to be pointing to online advertising, the print real estate magazines are still everywhere. Just last week, Homes & Land, one of the largest publishers in the niche, said it added 15 new franchises in the first half of 2007.

And Glenn Goad, EVP of Consumer Strategy for NCI (publisher of The Real Estate Book, among others) recently told Inman News the company has markets where the print books continue to grow. NCI does invest in its online offering, giving advertisers distribution of listings across the Web. The company also offers free virtual tours and is planning to release more online features in coming months.

Goad said NCI's four major Web sites -- LivingChoices.com, ApartmentFinder.com, TheRealEstateBook.com and UniqueHomes.com had a combined total of 2.4 million visits in June. Where do they come from? About half come from ads they see in the printed books, he says.

CNN Money Magazine's annual "Best Places to Live" feature released today with a new addition: Trulia is powering a home search feature on this year's list.

Joel Burslem at Future of Real Estate Marketing, writes that this is a "pretty big win for Trulia" because of the potential to put its brand in front of a wider consumer audience. (See full post here.)

And if you're wondering -- Middleton, Wisc., was this year's topper for Great American Towns.

Cyberhomes and AOL announced a partnership today that will make Cyberhomes the exclusive home valuation provider for AOL Real Estate. In a few months, Cyberhomes will also become the listings content provider to AOL, after the portal's longstanding exclusive partnership with Realtor.com ends.

We talked to Cyberhomes General Manager Marty Frame today who indicated that some aggressive broker and MLS partnerships will also be coming soon. (See Inman News story.)

Cyberhomes is marrying two sweet spots for real estate sites: instant home valuations and for-sale listings. The site has info on some 100 million properties nationwide and is already working on getting about 500,000 listings from initial broker partnerships.

With the launch of each new Real Estate 2.0 site a recurring theme comes up: It starts with an entrepreneurial-minded consumer who goes through a real estate transaction, feels like the process was antiquated, inefficient and/or too expensive and then gets inspired to build a Web site where others fell short. Having spoken to dozens of online real estate entrepreneurs over the last five years, this story is all too familiar. Many online companies grew out of frustration from the founder's own home sale.

The story appears again today with the launch of StrutYourHut.com, a site that boasts "Where real estate gets personal," a place where homeowners can "Show off what your home is really worth!" The free site invites sellers, landlords and agents to list properties using photos, videos, essays, blogs and messaging, while buyers and renters are invited to list the kind of home they're looking for.

From the company's blog:

"Why We Started Strut Your Hut…When my wife Tiffany and I started looking to buy our first home in Silver Spring, MD in 2004 we had no idea what we were in for. We started by looking for houses on our own and quickly found that the market was just too hectic for us to stay on top of finding a home in our range that would actually stay on the market. So, we signed on with our first agent…"

The story goes on to explain how the couple sold their house in 2006 using craigslist, then had to find a new place in Brooklyn, where they were moving.

"Well, we did find a place.  But only after blindly going to look at tons of places.  We stumbled upon a Realtor's office on the street, went in, told them what we wanted, and they showed us a place.  We paid a broker's fee (too much in my opinion, but that's the subject for another post).  If only we had seen all the no-good places before hand, we wouldn't have wasted so much time walking around the city!  And, we wouldn't have wasted all the brokers' and landlords' time."

Thus, a new real estate site is born. This is the founders "Strutting their hut": http://www.strutyourhut.com/05-13529, trying to build community around the sharing of real estate information.

StrutYourHut announced it is partnering with photo and video creation and sharing site One True Media, so that all users can produce video montages and animated slide shows of their homes or apartments. The site enables video sharing from YouTube and others, unlimited photo uploads, blogs for listings and an anonymous internal message center where users can contact each other.

Following the announcement that they are finally seeking broker feeds (see Zillow News), Zillow also has some big news on the local search front too.

They've lured well respected search expert Vanessa Fox away from Google, which is a pretty big win for the Seattle startup. Vanessa helped build Google Webmaster Central  and regularly represents the company at search engine strategy conferences (see her Wikipedia profile for more).

So what's a local and vertical search expert to do at a real estate valuation site?

I suspect that the two announcements are not unrelated and that along with a renewed push into aggregating listings, Zillow is looking at ways to make their listings and neighborhoods float higher in the organic search indexes.

I get the feeling this is the beginning of an all-out battle to own real estate search and Zillow is quietly stacking its deck with heavyweights. Anyone else in the space should be readying themselves to go the distance.

(h/t Real Central VA)

Technorati Tags: Zillow, Vanessa Fox, Real Estate Search, Real Estate, Real Estate 2.0

Redfin's revival of the controversial Sweet Digs blogs today brings to mind the MLS rule which got them shut down in the first place: Cooperating brokers agree not to advertise other brokers' listings. The Northwest MLS, of which Redfin is a member, ruled that its former in-person property reviews constituted advertising. Had the reviews been made by consumers not hired by Redfin, they wouldn't have been violating the policy. This calls attention to a fine line that's likely being questioned on other real estate Web sites: What is the definition of advertising and when is it advertising versus simply making public information more public?

At least one agent on Zillow.com has questioned this in regards to the feature that enables homeowners or agents to flag homes for sale on Zillow. An agent in this Q&A section of a property page was miffed that another agent presumably was flagging homes for sale. The thread has been chopped since I first noticed it last week, with certain comments removed, but the point was that this agent was questioning the other agent's authority to do this.

Redfin's Glenn Kelman mentioned in an interview last month that the MLS has a policy against commingling listing information with other non-MLS information on a Web site, though he said that Redfin's blog reviews were clearly separate from the listings on its site. In a Web 2.0 world where information is constantly being mashed up together in new ways, he worries that consumers won't be getting what they are looking for in real estate sites.

When you look at it that way, one could argue that it's more beneficial to be an outsider who's not a member in the MLS if online innovation is the goal.