Rather than reinvent the wheel (or the analysis/review), read Greg Swann’s and Jonathan Miller’s reviews, and the Trulia blog should have a summary/announcement soon here it is. I tend to stay away from national news that every other real estate blogger will write about, but this will likely impact how people search for homes in the Charlottesville area.

From Greg’s post –

My search turned up four houses. Not a big number, but all of them are reasonably well-suited to my needs. But: None of them is a perfect fit. Here’s the cool part: I can instruct Trulia to send me email updates or an RSS feed of changed data in that particular search. When a new home matching my criteria is listed at Trulia.com, I’ll learn about it right away. Or, if I like a particular house, but I don’t like the asking price, I can subscribe to get an email notification of future changes made to that one listing.

I can set up any number of tightly focused searches, each with its own email alert or RSS feed. That much is not news to Realtors. We do this every day, with much more robust search tools. But we do it for clients. The clients themselves don’t have direct access to the MLS system. Some added-cost IDX systems permit saved searches with email updates, but then the search is not terribly more robust than Trulia’s.

Why, oh why, oh why, is this feature so seemingly impossible for MLS vendors (at least the three with which I have personal experience)???

MLS’ may have the best data (for now) but few of them seem to be innovating at a rate even remotely approaching that of Trulia, et. al.

Check out Albemarle County’s heat map:

Again, the data is not yet close to complete (our MLS shows 1039 properties for sale in Albemarle County), but visually, the results are outstanding, and a very good start.

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