For pure home search, Terabitz puts all the cards on the table and all the icons on the map

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

When first I read about Terabitz this morning, I was prepared to make fun of it. It looks and “plays” like an on-line video game. Instead of a simple check-box-based user-interface on top of a map, you drag out icons for the types of searches you want to run, then build a mashed-up map like the one shown above from the results. My guess is that the intent is artificially to limit the number of things you search for at one time, but the overall effect is at least as fun as an on-line video game.

From VentureBeat:

Terabitz is launching a comprehensive site for home buyers wanting to organizing and map information about their prospective homes.

Think of it as a cross between a personal homepage (like iGoogle or Netvibes, for example) and a real estate information site (like Trulia or Zillow).

You can drag and drop housing information from menu bars into a central dashboard with a set of data displays. With one click, you can map this data using the site’s Google Maps mashup.

Besides for-sale listings, there’s information like average local mortgage rates, average rental fees and other real estate information.

You can also find out all sorts of good things about a place that are harder to quantify, like nearby restaurants, libraries, schools, coffee shops. Even the FBI’s crime — and specifically sex offender — database gets included.

This non real estate data is what sets Terabitz, of Palo Alto, Calif. apart from sites like Zillow and Trulia, which also offer home profile pages that are limited mainly to real estate data.

You can customize your own page of data widgets about your prospective home. You can also make an image of your data collection and share it with other users or email to friends.

More from John Cook’s Venture Blog:

Yet another startup company is entering the online real estate category. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Terabitz — backed with $10 million in funding from Tudor Capital and originally conceived by 17-year-old Kamran Munshi — is attempting to create a site that will help home buyers or apartment hunters manage the process from beginning to end. Its tagline: “every bit on real estate.”

In a press release, Terabitz says that its service will do for online real estate what TiVo did for television, eBay did for auctions and iTunes did for music. It also takes a swipe at Zillow, the Seattle online home valuation service that has raised $57 million to date.

“People need an easy way to manage the dozens of sources of information that comprise a move. Companies such as Zillow have attempted to solve this problem, but offer only single, narrow solutions,” says Chief Executive Ashfaq Munshi, the former chief executive of Level5 Networks and father of Kamran Munshi.

I can think of three things that give me pause about Terabitz:

1. There are already much better map mash-ups out there, most notably map searches that use the map interface as the user interface, reflecting changes to search criteria on the fly. Estately is doing all of this, including the ancillary community features, in a better, cleaner way.
2. The entire on-line real estate space seems to be predicated on the idea that everyone is a relo. Almost nobody is. I like the idea of having all of these disparate information sources under one roof, but each one of them is inherently error-prone, raising the aggregated noise factor to cacophonous levels. More to the point: I already know where all the fast food joints are.
3. How the heck are these goofy sites supposed to pay for themselves? Per VentureBeat, Terabitz “hopes to make money by connecting its users with realtors and other local services, charging transaction fees in the process.” Good thing nobody ever thought of that one before. Note that what you’re seeing in the map above is me in my secret identity as a Realtor. Will Terabitz be concealing this information later, so they can sell users and Realtors to each other?

Now I’m back to where I started. This is a better joke than Trulia.com was a year ago, but it’s still just funny. The information is potentially useful, and I might like it better if it were organized with a little less Tarot Syndrome, as it were. But I don’t think there is any money in any of this.

There actually is a way to make money from these kinds of ideas — milk the Realtors one-at-a-time as a map-based IDX system — but that’s an idea with limited penetration, so far.

More: The Real Estate Bloggers, Wired Blog Network.

Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing