Find Your Next Home the Wal-Mart Way

Yes, this is for real:

You can now search for your next home on either Wal-Mart.com or Overstock.com. Really. It's true.

All I have to say is that if Wal-Mart does half as good of a job selling those houses as they did these Chic Jeans, there's no way they can lose.

Trulia Snapshot Brings Sexy Back to Real Estate

Trulia's new toy, Trulia Snapshot, is the coolest, most gorgeous real estate search toy tool I have ever seen.

You simply have to give it a whirl to know what I mean. If you like pretty, shiny things, go play with the Knoxville listings and come back and let me know what you think.

NAR & DOJ Are Now BFFs

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have finally reached a settlement over the display of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listings on Virtual Office Websites (VOWs). Whew! That's a lot of acronyms for saying that online only brokerages that don't exist in the brick and mortar world can put MLS listings on their sites.

A lot of people are saying this is the end of real estate as we know it and things are going to seriously start changing in the real estate marketplace.

Um, except that during the 3 years it took NAR and the DOJ to reach this settlement, a lot has already seriously changed in the real estate market, especially when it comes to transparency and online information. From The Real Estate Bloggers:

The opening of the MLS systems to online and virtual real estate companies has long been over. The bigger battle will be the viability of maintaining an expensive MLS in the age of Trulias and Zillows.

Think about it, the lawsuit was to force the brokerages to allow online real estate agents to post their homes. Now we have the major real estate firms signing deals with Zillow to post their listings directly bypassing these online agents.

So essentially the National Association of Realtors has spent their dues not on developing better systems to grow the business of their members, but to fight for the right to have the monopoly on buggy whips.

Ouch.

Hey, NAR? Can I have my last three years worth of dues back now? I have a $60 tank of gas to buy to drive clients around who found a bunch of homes to look at on Trulia last night. Thanks.

Coolest Tool Yet: PolicyMap

OK, I've shared some websites with you before that I thought were pretty cool. And at the time I shared them, they were. But that was before @Admore tipped me off to PolicyMap.

PolicyMap is a brand new monster research tool that you really have to play with to believe. According to the developers:

... [PolicyMap] combines sophisticated technology and the best analytical tools to deliver a new level of accessibility to data. And we mean all kinds of data – more than 4,000 indicators related to demographics, real estate markets, money and income, education, crime and more.

They're not kidding about that data, either. PolicyMap provides you with information you find on sites like Zipskinny and Zilpy and then some - everything from residential energy consumption to campaign contributions by geographical area. You can search by state, county, city, or even by congressional and school districts. In addition, PolicyMap has tons more crime statistics for the Knox County area than SpotCrime.

And that's not all. PolicyMap doesn't just give you data, it goes even further by allowing you to create your own layered "heat maps," tables and reports from the data it provides. Now that's cool.

Unfortunately, there is a "but" in all of this: some of the information on the site is for subscribers only, and subscriptions don't come cheap - $2,000 per year for the standard package alone. Ouch.

But even without that extra level of data, PolicyMap is a still an awesome resource that I've only scratched the surface of here. Go check it out for yourself, and then come back here and let me know what cool stuff you find. Happy hunting!

Knoxville, Actually

Knoxify, the site concerned with all things great about Knoxville, has put together a little list of blogs and sites they think "exemplify who the real Knoxville is." My humble blog made the cut, and I didn't even have to pay them anything for it. Yet. Thanks guys!

Check out the other guys who made the list and while you're there check out the rest of Knoxify - it's worth your time.

First Friday 411

You really should stop by Instaknox if you haven't already. It's kind of like Knoxville's very own Twitter, and sometimes you can come across cool stuff like local artist's Steve Lareau's website, KnoxvilleFirstFriday.com. From Steve's message on Instaknox:

First Friday info around here has been impossible to find. Web sites for the different galleries sometimes aren’t updated, even the web site for First Friday by the market square district has zero information. Being an artist, it’s frustrating not to be able to find out who even participates, aside from a few places on Market Square...

...Eventually, [the website will] have a place for local artists to be listed, as well as the different galleries that participate.

The website is still in its infancy, but it looks like it could turn into a very valuable tool for those of you who actually get Friday nights off to do fun stuff.