The Lighthouse Log is the newspaper for Lunenburg County in Nova Scotia; their website is SouthShoreNow.ca. You can check out thier list of Pictou County Real Estate For Sale to see how HomeZilla has integrated into their website.

HomeZilla powering their print section is key to a succesful partnership because in small communities print is still king.
Check out the Lighthouse Log PDF .

As a testiment to the product, every real estate offices servicing Lungenburg County has joined to help produce this innovative product.

What do you think? What would you change about the print page? What about the website?

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!

Why did HomeZilla give away free ads? As we talked with real estate agents, they gave us many reason why they didn’t advertise online. For most, the real and most hidden reason, was they didn’t know how to get the ad creative. Once they had an ad they could run, they were only too happy to advertise.

So, small step for ads , one giant leap for agents advertising online.

You might notice that one office Exit Realty Metro had a bunch of agents come on board. One of Exit Realty Metro’s agents, Colleen Verville, has integrated HomeZilla’s Hoody as well.

Now here are the agents, with their creative, that took advantage of this offer.

Are you reading this post and thinking, “I want a free ad?”. HomeZilla will create ads for 35 more agents… just comment on this blog and leave us your details…or send us a tweet.

Offer good until Dec 25th…then we turn into Scrooge!