Terabitz Launches Web Platform for Brokers

Terabitz has been very quiet lately.

A refresher for those of you might not have heard of the company -- they launched in 2007 to much fanfare -- as a sort of "Netvibes for real estate" -- but the company made hard tack to starboard in the years since and have reinvented themselves as a platform for real estate brokerages.

It's a crowded marketplace in that space, but certainly one that is always ripe for innovation. This week they've pulled up the curtain on what they've been up to with a new release of their platform.

It includes a number of back-end features that build off their data-aggregation chops to allow brokers to create content-rich websites. From their press release:

Neighborhood and Community pages featuring business reviews, photos and school reports (via implementation of the Yelp, Flickr, and Education.com APIs) as well as hyperlocal news content (via implementation of Yahoo Pipes).

Real estate market reports featuring data and trends derived from live MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data and displayed in a way the average user can understand at a glance. Market reports are provided at the neighborhood and community level, which makes them far more useful than typical city or county-level views.

Property search that better merchandizes listings through a "gallery" view that enables the user to view large photos in the search results display.

Explore the Neighborhood, a map-based tool that enables users to view amenities in the area of their home search – businesses, places of worship, recreational facilities and more – in order to better understand what it is like to live in a place.

Terabitz One-to-One, a prospecting tool that enables agents to create dedicated, automatically updating websites for homeowners that display recent sales, new listings and a dynamic home value estimate.

The Terabitz platform is modeled on the relaunch of Chicago brokerage @properties' website. @properties is a company that's proved it's willing to invest in potentially game-changing ideas (see Real Estate Search Stores – Coming Soon?), so it seems like a natural fit.

The redesign is clean, simple and well executed. But I'm not a fan of having to register in order to search for a home -- so I didn't get a chance to test out the search tool. And it was doubly annoying that every listing I clicked on I had to create an account … how about a couple freebies, guys?

Nevertheless, I did like Terabitz platform's neighborhood and community pages (like this one for Lincoln Park, for example) which were a nice collection of a series of different data sources. My only suggestion would be to add more media; more photos (the Flickr stream pulls in some pretty random stuff) -- professionally produced neighborhood videos would be a fantastic addition to those pages too.

In any case, it seems this release is why we hadn't heard much from Terabitz recently. It turns out they've had their heads down coding.

Click here to view the original blog post from Future of Real Estate Marketing, An Inman News Company.

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