HomeZilla Corporate Blog » New Features

Nova Scotia listing photos go to the judges!

sandy — Fri, 07 May 2010 14:08:00 +0000

This Friday we are happy to annouce a new, fun and informative feature on HomeZilla.
The ‘Best and Worst’ of listing photos from our Nova Scotia feed.

On each slide show HomeZilla puts a ‘thumbs up/thumbs down’ button for visitors to cast their vote.

Each visitor gets a single vote per pictures. We tally the votes and create our list of the best and worst listing photos. Real estate agents have said ‘get rid of the Worst Listing Photos’ but my question to you is…. which link do you want to click first:

Please give us lots of feedback…it is a new feature so we wants lots of it.

Listing Photos – The good, bad, and ugly!

sandy — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:03:21 +0000

Everyone starts their home buying process online. That means listing photos are one of the first things people will use to ‘judge’ your home. Are these photos good? bad? just ugly? Well HomeZilla has launched a new feature to find out what people think of listing photos.

When you view a slideshow of listing photos on HomeZilla there will be ‘thumbs up | thumbs down’ buttons which allow you to cast your vote. Then starting on May 7th we will have the ‘Top 10 Best’ and ‘Top 10 Worst’ listing photos for the past week.

Check out the new feature on this listing by Roz Prince at 58 Sinclair St, Dartmouth_NS.

What do you think of the new feature? Like it? Love it? We want your feedback.

HomeZilla & Google Street View a match made for home buyers!

sandy — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:34:22 +0000

We are very happy to annouce the itegration of Google Street View for Canada into our site. After researching the closest schools, parks, subway stops, and liquor stores (they won’t admit it but home buyers search for them) you can quickly get a good look at the street as well.

(Look for the ‘Street View’ button above the map)

Google Street View Canada is available for 12 cities:

We wanted to launch this before the Turkey Day long weekend because, based on previous trends, lots of people will be researching homes this weekend. We thought having Google Street View would make it a bit more fun.

As always, we would love to hear your comments!

Have a great Turkey Day weekend everyone.

Sutton enhances listing with the HomeZilla Hoody

sandy — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:03:44 +0000

The HomeZilla team is pleased to annouce our partnership with Sutton Group Realty Serivce Inc. Sutton has added our Hoody to their listings. Ex: Check out the ammenities around a $17,000,000 house. Sutton has been increasing their web presence steadily in 2009 our Hoody is just the latest step.

“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.

Top 10 most searched Canadian Neighbourhoods

sandy — Wed, 20 May 2009 18:57:19 +0000

One of the most interesting trends we see at HomeZilla is the most popular neighbourhoods across Canada. Here is a quick list of the most searched neighbourhoods in Canada for April 2009.

Downtown Neighbourhood Toronto
St. James Town Neighbourhood Toronto
Granview-Woodland Neighbourhood Vancouver
East Credit Neighbourhood Mississauga
Downtown Neighbourhood Kelowna
Fairview Neighbourhood Vancouver
King-Spadina Neighbourhood Toronto
Heart Lake East Neighbourhood Brampton
Bristol Neighbourhood Milton
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.

Canadian neighbourhoods get promoted…on HomeZilla

sandy — Tue, 12 May 2009 20:23:23 +0000

Today, we have launched a ‘Browse Neighbourhood’ feature for visitors to HomeZilla. This will allow people to quickly see all of the neighbourhoods, and their bounds, for cities across Canada.

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…

HomeZilla Featured on Real Investments TV

sandy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:14:29 +0000

Our great press coveage continues with a piece on Real Investments TV featuring HomeZilla as Canada’s Neighbourhood Experts. The start of the video has the TV intro and then the HomeZilla story; the video is three minutes in length.

We have received a great response from agents. Most of the emails we received are about being part of our blogging network and how they can advertise on our website. We can do small scale advertising and will be rolling out large scale advertising later in this year.

If you have any questions just drop us a line…

Print your Canadian neighbourhood reports at HomeZilla

sandy — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:33:03 +0000

One of our most popular features is also our least promoted. Everyone doing real estate research on HomeZilla can quickly print a free neighbourhood report. More and more people are using this feature; especially on Thrusday. We aren’t 100% sure why people do most of their printing on Thursdays but we are guessing it has to do with seeing open houses on the weekends.

Are you a ‘Thrusday printer’? If so, drop us a line and let us know why…

HomeZilla’s search now offers Canadian neighbourhood information

sandy — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:46:27 +0000

Starting today, when you search a house address on HomeZilla you also get the name of the neighbourhood.

Our neighbourhood data comes from DMTI Spatial. It is a fantastic amount of neighbourhood and community boundries and our current neighbourhood feature is only the start.

In the coming months, look forward to seeing:

a neighbourhood browser – lets you browse neighbourhoods on the map
neighbourhood lists – review a list of all neighbourhoods in a city
neighbourhood profiles – get a written overview for each neighbourhood

Try our search and, please, send us any comments…

New features at HomeZilla

sandy — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:10:29 +0000

We have just pushed live a couple of new features and improvements; which have been the most requested. HomeZilla has updates to the site every two weeks but we don’t always talk about the process. This week is different because we have added two small but great features.

The first feature is the ‘link’ feature which will allow people to easily share links to HomeZilla maps. We used the Google Maps convention but if you have other suggestions we would love to hear them.

The second, and most requested feature, is ‘Expand the Map’. Just click one button and you can add an extra 200 pixels of length to our the map. We would love to get some feedback from our ‘map only’ visitors.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we have done a bunch of performance improvements. Creating a ’snappy’ application with big maps and lots of data isn’t easy but we are getting there. If you are on a quick connection you should see a huge improvement. For dial-up users, well we can only do so much for you. Sorry!

Till next time…