1. Google’s will move into Canadian Real Estate – Google already has 10K+ Canadian real etate listings (ex:Halifax listings) and they don’t promote their service in Canada. Are you ready for ‘the Google affect’?
2. CREA or TREB will face another lawsuit – the Internet (like the fax machine was) is a disruptive force in the real estate industy. With the Canadian Real Estate industry dragging it feet, we expect to see another lawsuit.
3. Online real estate research will get easier – home buyers do more research, before talking to a real estate agent, every year. In 2010, with ZooCasa, HomeZilla, Google Maps, the iPhone and the opening of GeoData new home buyers are going to know EVERYTHING about a neighbourhood.
4. Vitural Real Estate will start emerging – the progression of visual aids in home buying: photos, photo tours, videos, video tours, now HD video tours and the next logical step Virtual Real Estate displayed on Google Earth and the iPhone. VR homes will make a big change to how people research houses.
5. Local Knowledge will become vital for listings – OpenData Toronto, OpenData Vancouver, HomeZilla, and Yelp all home buyers to know more about their neighbourhood. To keep home buyers on your listings they need to have local knowledge. (see HomeZilla Hoody)
6. Mortgage rate will go up – Canada can only ‘print money’ for so long before inflation hits. Once rates start going up in 2010, they will go up quickly!
7. Yet another Boom/Bust cycle – there will be a mini boom/bust in real estate when mortgage rates hit around 7.5%. Home buyers will rush to buy homes before a the big rate hikes and if they don’t get in they won’t buy for a while.
8. Online Advertising – 2010 will be the year where a large number of real estate agentswill move beyond the “just having a website” to “having & promoting their website”. If you are paying $50 a month to have a website, shouldn’t you spend at least $50 a month to promote that website?
9. Blackberry Usage – less then 5% of real estate agents will give up their Blackberrys for iPhones. Why change what is working?
10. iPhones become a big real estate aid – When home buyers have questions… well… “there is an an app for that”! Consumers are flocking to the iPhone so when a consumer goes to an open house, drives around a neighbourhood, or has questions about sales history they will ask a Realtor but there will also ask their iPhone.

At HomeZilla, we love when things come together. In 2010, the convergance of technology, open data, empowered home buyers, rising house prices, rising mortgage rates, decreasing costs of data will have a HUGE impact on the Canadian Real Estate market. And in our opinion, all the changes should be for the better!

During the year we will follow up on these topics will longer blog post but we would love questions or comment over the holidays. And of course, what are your predictions for 2010?

Happy Holidays Everyone!

We have already integreated Toronto’s Open Data for Parks and Toronto’s Open Data for Child Care. Both of these data sets have increased the quality of HomeZilla’s data.

The Toronto Parks data added 28% new parks to HomeZilla’s database and the Child Care data added 5% new locations. But the real benefit for HomeZilla is in the data maintenance. The City of Toronto will be producing this fantastic information and saving HomeZilla the cost of collecting the data.

Of course, with any new source of data there will be little problems with usage. Luckily with Toronto’s Open Data HomeZilla there are ‘good’ problems. Usually the problem to draw bounding lines by hand; I don’t have a painter’s steady hand. But with the parks data the biggest problem was the Rosedale Ravine Trail, which is huge, was broken into eight segments.

So, HomeZilla had to decide:

• what is the centre point of the park?
• should we combine the eight polygons?
• should we list it as eight different parks?

For us, they were FANTASTIC problems to have so hats off to the City of Toronto.

To help contribute to the community, HomeZilla has converted two of the ESRI Shapefiles into KML files for people to download. These should be great quality because of the source but we make no promises so use ‘as-is’ but we would love feedback.

You can down load the KML files here:

• Toronto Address Points in KML source Open Toronto.
• Toronto Parks in KML source Open Toronto.

Go Open Data!

The first ‘wish/tenant’ that 5 Blocks Out mentioned was:

If you’re publishing it for humans, publish it for machines too. We need data in machine-readable open standard formats like JSON, XML, CSV, iCal, and so on. Not just PDF.

We at HomeZilla couldn’t agree more! We have spent a lot of money for people to ‘re-type’ PDFs into a more usable format. Please government…stop releasing ONLY PDF versions of data…instead release the raw data as well.

The three things Osh asked for were:

1. Lists of places, including place name and location information.
2. Event data
3. TTC route, stop, and vehicle location information.

And two of those are things HomeZilla wants as well. Our top five requests for open data would be:

1. Lists of public places, including place name and an exact latitude & longitude.
2. Public transit routes, stops, and make sure to include multiple door entrances for stations
3. City election bounds, polling stations, and vote counts for as many years as possible.
4. nvironmentally ‘monitored’ locations (gas stations, recycling, land fills, etc)
5. Building permits and building applications

One big difference between our posts is that HomeZilla needs this data for all of Canada. Getting data for one city is good but Canada wide data is fantastic! For Open Data to go nationwide, the mind set of sharing data will have to change from ‘never give it out’ to ‘always give it out’…and that mind shift is happening but it will take a while. Governments can help this by getting on TV, radio, Twitter, and telling people… “Share your data! Not sure what to share, research it quickly then give it away!”

HomeZilla wants our top five sets of data listed above…but causing a mind shift in sharing data is even more important!

Here is a screen shot our the Halifax Real Estate TweetLens where you can see the map of the tweets as well as a list of tweets below.

Halifax Real Estate TweetLens

Here are a few possible uses for our TweetLens:

• Get real time real estate knowledge
• Find ‘techie’ realtors in a city
• Look for new listings

What other ways are you using the site?

“Adding HomeZilla’s neighbourhood intelligence to Sutton’s listings was an important part of our new technology offerings,” said Gabriel Soh, Marketing Manager at Sutton Group Realty Services Ltd. “Home buyers are demanding more neighbourhood knowledge and HomeZilla’s Hoody gives them access to that information.”

Example of the HomeZilla Hoody on Sutton

Having the Hoody on Sutton increases HomeZilla’s reach and but the big win is the boost to HomeZilla Analytics. Our analytic tools produce reports on research trends for a given house, neighbourhood, or city. Being tied to specific listings will help us better understand how people research a specific house.

This is a first step in the Hoody’s evolution. My questions to you…
What other neighbourhood information would you want to see? More businesses? Neighbourhood bounds? Election history?

We have one more partner in pipeline to integrate our Hoody but if you want a Hoody for your listing drop me an email sandy [at] homezilla [dot] com. If you just want a Word Press real estate widget you can download it from us.

This month the HomeZilla team would like to share an example of a small change making a big difference.

The feature we redesigned was “Keyword Search”. This allows people to search the HomeZilla database of geo-data for any words they want. This is especially important since our interface only reveals between 8-12 categories (depends on the city).

Unfortunately, until five days ago our “Keyword Search” was barely used. Less then 10% of the visitors to HomeZilla’s Search page used “Keyword Search”. For the last few months, we have been trying to improve the design through A/B testing.

So what happened five days ago, well our A/B testing of “Keyword Search” finally paid off. We have a new design that has drymatically increased usage of “Custom Search” (notice the new name?)

Here are images of our BEFORE (on the left) and AFTER (on the right) designs.

Before

Old custom search design

After

New custom search design

What did we change?
Just a couple of small things:

1. Change “Keyword Search” to “Custom Search”
2. Added some “Tip Text” before the text box.

What was the result?
Since launching these new changes, usage on HomeZilla’s “Keyword Search” has increased to, on average, 25%. That is over a 150% gain from changing 6 letters and adding 25 letters.

There was probably 5 different split tests before getting it ‘right’ but it was worth it.

Do you have example of small changes making a huge impact? Do you have some suggestions for HomeZilla? We would love to hear them…

1. Downtown Neighbourhood Toronto
2. St. James Town Neighbourhood Toronto
3. Granview-Woodland Neighbourhood Vancouver
4. East Credit Neighbourhood Mississauga
5. Downtown Neighbourhood Kelowna
6. Fairview Neighbourhood Vancouver
7. King-Spadina Neighbourhood Toronto
8. Heart Lake East Neighbourhood Brampton
9. Bristol Neighbourhood Milton
10. Halifax Downtown Neighbourhood Halifax

For people not farmiliar with St Jame’s Town in Toronto, this area has the highest population density in Canada so it is no surprise there are a lot of searches from this area.

Back in December, HomeZilla started displaying the neighbourhood associated with a given address. Now visitors can find the surrounding neighbourhoods by simply clicking one check box.

Try looking at Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, or search any other city in Canada.

Since this is a new feature, let us know what you think…

Today, we are happy to annouce the Hoody plugin for Wordpress. You can download the Hoody plugin today!

The Hoody plugin is easy to use. Enter a line like:
* Example: [ HomeZilla]24 Sussex Ave Ottawa Ontario[/ HomeZilla]

Download, unzip, and upload to your blog’s ‘wp-content/plugins/’ directory. Then go to the blog admin interface and activate the plugin. Add your HomeZilla Application ID to the configuration page. Easy!

Getting a HomeZilla Application ID will be automated very soon but for now send please request on through an email. info [at] homezilla [dot] com.

Canadian real estate agents are coming aboard Twitter in droves and HomeZilla has been trying to track them all down to help us stay on top of the real estate game in Canada. So, we are going to create and maintain a list of Canadian real estate agents on Twitter. Currenly, there are 73 75 77 80 91 agents from across Canada on the list.

Please spread the word to help build this list of Canada real estate agents on Twitter.

1. Amie Trinder @RealtorAmie
2. Matt Richling @MattRichling
3. Cori Endrody @Cori_the_Agent
4. Charlie Cannizzaro @HamiltonLiving
5. Matthew Collinge @604homesguy
6. Amie Trinder @RealtorAmie
7. Matt Richling @MattRichling
8. Cori Endrody @Cori_the_Agent
9. Charlie Cannizzaro @HamiltonLiving
10. Matthew Collinge @604homesguy
11. EdmontonRealEstate @johncarle
12. Sara MacLennan @edmontonblogger
13. Eldean J. Dickenson @EJDickenson
14. Bo Kauffmann @bokauffmann
15. KenLeBlanc @KenLeBlanc
16. MonctonHomeTours @MonctonTours
17. Audrey Colantonio @ignitehsr
18. Jay Kowal @jaycola
19. Dave at ChomzTV.com @DaveChomitz
20. NickKaradza @NickKaradza
21. Sarah Speer @SarahSellsHomes
22. Tina Mak @tinamak
23. Toronto Real Estate @PageandPercival
24. Lisa Roth Collins @torontosuburbs
25. Paul Sidhu @MortgageToronto
26. Toronto Real Estate @HeyAddy
27. Georgetown Realtor @CallDerek
28. richardsilver @richardsilver
29. brianbevington @brianbevington
30. Joy Paterson @JoyRealEstate
31. Shaun Nilsson @ShaunnySales
32. Vanessa Calko @vanessacalko
33. Shirley @ShirleyPorter
34. RE/MAX @REMAXCanada
35. Sam Soukas @AgentSam
36. Tim Ayres @TimAyres
37. Suzanne Helmke @suzanneC21
38. Charles Isherwood @ChuckIsherwood
39. Fred Carver @victoriarealtor
40. Sean Farrell @FarrellTeam
41. Mike Leibel @calgarymike
42. Richard Greaves @SoldbyRichard
43. Justin Havre @JustinHavre
44. Mark Fidgett @MortgageMark
45. Paul Liberatore- TRG @PaulLiberatore
46. Trisha Bongers @RealtyNuance
47. Kathy Stilwell @KathyStilwell
48. Ian Watt @IanWatt
49. Bill Jones @c21Bill
50. joelives @joelives
51. Century 21 Colonial @C21Colonial
52. Lainie Rideout @lainie13
53. R. Greg Osmond @rgosmond
54. Michael Landers @mhlanders
55. sheldonpearce @sheldonpearce
56. Real Estate @housing_agent
57. lola doucet @loladoucet
58. Chris J Dickson @halibu
59. Andrew Perkins @HalifaxREguy
60. wesellhalifax @wesellhalifax
61. Blair Smith @realtorblair
62. Charlie Cannizzaro @HomesBurlington
63. Sarah Dares Halifax @HalifaxRealtor
64. UniqueHomeSites @uniquehomesites
65. George W. Jordan @peibossman
66. Paul Viau @prviau
67. Mike Shanks @mikepgww
68. Fran_and_Rowena @Fran_and_Rowena
69. Dennis Cha @RealtorCha
70. Paulette Upshall @pupshall
71. Sean Aske @askerealestate
72. Tony White @HalifaxHomeTeam
73. vikchaudhary @vikchaudhary
74. Rob Viccars @RobViccars
75. Sutton Group @SuttonGroup
76. Erica Baumgart @realtor_erica
77. Gail Reeves @gareeves
78. Margaret Joyce @MargJoyce
79. Tara D’Oliveira @taradoliveira
80. Andrew Perkins @halifaxREguy
81. Randy Book @randybook
82. Linda Book @lindabook
83. Carl Minicucci @VaughanAgent
84. Jim Marshall @jimmarshall
85. Joseph DeLeo @JosephDeLeo
86. Andrew Perkins @halifaxREguy
87. Joel Ives @joelives
88. Cam Foster @Condoman
89. Alex Rundle @alexrundle
90. PEI PropertyGuys @PEIPropertyGuys
91. Dawn Elliott @dawnelliott1
92. Paul Indrigo @loftsellers
93. Justin Havre @JustinHavre
94. Chris Newell @chrisnewell
95. Neil McGuinness @adventvancouver
96. We Sell Halifax @wesellhalifax
97. Chris Cochrane @SecretAgent00
98. Cathy + Tanya Rocca @RealEstateRocca
99. James Killoran @jameskilloran
100. Sean Brawley @SeanBrawley
101. RE/MAX Ontario and Atlantic Canada @remaxoa
102. Red Door Realty@RedDoorRealty

If you wanted to be added to this list, just leave a comment and you will be added.