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Zillow, the real estate social networking service is facing a cease and desist order in the state of Arizona. The order has been issued citing the fact that Zillow needs to be a certified appraiser in order to provide such information to the general public. Zillow gets its information from public documents and offers property estimates along with being a social network for home buyers, sellers and renters.

Zillow has been disliked from the start by many in the real estate industry, including Realtors and the National Community of Reinvestment Coalition, who insist that the real estate estimates provided by Zillow are way off the mark. Zillow on the other hand is obviously guilty of making real estate information, that was previously buried under loads of public documents, easily accessible to home buyers and sellers. This information was the only competitive advantage that Realtors had over general public, and also a prime argument and source of income for them.

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YourStreet, a service that has just launched, will be bringing a social network to your street. The service empowers homeowners, buyers, sellers and renters to learn and share inside knowledge about their local neighbourhoods. The service is really similar to Australian based StreetAdvisor that launched in March. At the moment I do not see much of a difference between the StreetAdvisor and YourStreet, but that might change in coming days and months.

YourStreet employs a variety of social networking tools to facilitate and encourage conversations between the local residents. The user generated Market Monitor charts tracks the neighborhood´s real estate market. Visitors to the site rate their local markets on a scale of 0 to 10 and these votes are averaged together to produce a continually updated chart of consumer opinion for each neighborhood. This will place YourStreet on a collision course with Zillow, which also provides users with real estate valuations. YourStreet also provides users with Wikis and forums to share in depth information and analysis about the locality. Users could also share photos of the locality to provide a visual snapshot of the neighborhood.

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Yahoo Real Estate has teamed up with Reality Trac, one of the leading marketplace for foreclosure properties, to launch foreclosure resource center. The new service provides users with 3 key features: the ability to search for foreclosures; analysis trends in the foreclosure market; and educate them about buying properties in foreclosure. The center has been launch amidst slowing real estate market to tap on the increasing foreclosures. This is a great time for potential buyers to tap into substantial discounts on homes that are in foreclosure.

Real Estate market is recently getting a lot of focus and the once closed door knowledge is now being brought to light by the use of intuitive services. Yahoo Real Estate that was once amongst the prime sites to get Real Estate information is now being battered by young startups like Trulia, Zillow and Reply.com

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Reply.com, a competitor to Zillow in the lucrative real estate market has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Outlook Ventures with existing backer Scale Venture Partners also participating in the round.

Reply.com allows users to search for houses, see instant valuations, place unsolicited bids on homes via Reply.com (which charges $10-$25 for bid representation). These bids are then sent via priority mail. The popularity of Zillow will surely trigger uptake of Reply.com, as people checking Zillow will want to have a second opinion. Reply.com also allows users to rate houses extensively, something that Zillow does not have at the moment.

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Zillow, a very impressive real estate service has become interactive by adding Q&A to every house in its index. Users will now be able to ask questions about the house and any one else could answer it. The answers could come from individuals living in the locality, real estate agents trying to sell the house or trying to boast price of a house near by. All answers can be rated as well.

The Q&A will be displayed right on the Zillow front page, but will not be geo targeted, i.e a sample of all questions would be displayed instead of the ones relevant to your location. Zillow is also planning to launch a personalized “real estate” homepage. Another feature that has made into this release is a personal profile, enabling all users to have a page where their questions, answers and helpfulness stats will be listed. This will tell a lot to the buyer about the person answering his questions. Another very important yet very subtle feature is the ability of users to flag a house “for sale”. This will really add the value, generate fresh listings and allow sellers to sell quickly.

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StreetAdvisor will be launching today to enable people to easily get access to and review their neighbourhood and more.

StreetAdvisor is based in Australia and aims to become a highly targeted social network for your neighbourhood and streets. It will allow the community to share the essence of their locality by allowing them to share information like street noise, public transportation info, street and night life, gossips and stories of the community. Other social network goodies like ranking, reviews, street maps etc are naturally included.

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