estate

Real estate Web sites are featuring a growing number of homes that are in pre-foreclosure and foreclosure. In March, Yahoo Real Estate launched a site focused on foreclosures with Realty Trac broadening the reach of information to nearly 500 million global users. "The goal for you as a buyer is to purchase a property at least 20 percent below full market value, although better deals are often possible," reads Yahoo's site.

Real estate site Zillow.com, which focuses on house price comparisons has entered a deal with the publishers of 282 newspapers to carry their real estate advertisements.

So what if the real estate market is tanking?  I think that’s much more interesting to read about than a break-even or everybody-gets-rich scenario, and some investors may feel the same way; Curbed.com, a blog that covers real estate, just received $1.5 million in funding.

Google’s in it for the long haul - the search giant just signed a three-year deal with Network Communications, “the leading publisher of printed and online real estate information in North America.”  At stake?  AdWords.

Redfin is an “online brokerage for residential real estate,” and, if you read the company’s website, it was actually the first one.  It’s probably also the richest - Redfin just received $12 million in financing.

Finding permanent housing is a tricky thing - one has to consider location, price, size, age, and about a million other factors; renters have it even tougher, in a sense, as they have to make those choices year after year.  Now Yahoo Real Estate has decided that Apartments.com is just the site to help these people out.

For an outfit like Google, $50,000 isn’t much - this is, after all, the corporation that bought a full-size SpaceShipOne replica for no apparent reason.  But for Redfin, a $50,000 loss is a show-stopper, and the real estate company shut down part of its “Sweet Digs” blog after being fined that amount.

One of the most precious commodities in the world is real estate. Everyone is looking for their own little piece of the world to settle and call their own. Home ownership is a goal shared by so many that it seems appropriate that companies like Google and Yahoo would go to such lengths to cater to real estate searchers.