Homethinking Redux
My angel investment “HomeThinking”:http://www.homethinking.com launched the “second revision”:http://blog.homethinking.com/2006/09/07/homethinking-redux/ of its site at the end of last week. Kudos to “Niki”:http://www.brontemedia.com, Kelvin and the whole team in NY.
As a summary, HomeThinking is a different kind of real estate site. Instead of focussing on real estate for sale, it instead focusses on the real estate broker.
The aim is to provide information and tools to help home _sellers_ find an appropriate real estate broker for them, through both qualitative (human generated broker reviews) and quantitative (massive scale number crunching!) methods. This is not an easy task.
Choosing a broker also happens to be the second largest financial decision most people make in their lives, and scant little thought is paid to it. “The guy down the road” is the most popular answer if you ask someone where they found their broker. Hence for such a large decision, tools are needed – hence HomeThinking.
Currently we’re tracking over 1.5 _million_ real estate brokers at HomeThinking. Yes, you read that right. 1.5 _million_ brokers. Mind boggling isn’t it?
Considering there are “149 million people”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States US workforce – more than 1% of the workforce are real estate brokers.
Finding a good one is not easy – and that’s what we’re trying to help.
One of the new features is an embeddable recent real estate sales map that shows the recent home sales in an area and merges in the broker details.
Here’s the example for Potrero Hill where I spend my hours in San Francisco, that you can click around inside my blog:
@import url(“/ui/style/homethinking-box.css”);
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById(‘homethinkingmap’));
map.addZoomShort();
map.addOverlay(new YGeoRSS(‘http://www.homethinking.com/georss/94110′));
»Get a recent home sales map for your site.
» About: Homethinking monitors what each real estate agent has done and consumer reviews about them.
For more details on the relaunch, read “HomeThinking redux”:http://blog.homethinking.com/2006/09/07/homethinking-redux/ on their blog or the of the formal “press release”:http://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/9/prweb433918.htm.
