In this week’s Real Estate Sales and Technology news we cover the just launched Neighborhood Pricing Tool for Realtors, Pocket Listings Technology Trends, the future of Social Media for Real Estate in the Home Buying Process and Advertising on the Real Estate Social Media Network.

New Neighborhood Pricing Tool for Realtors just launched

Ever been caught off guard by a buyer? Didn’t have time to do your homework? California brokerage & tech firm Tumlis will now allow any agent to be prepared with instanteous market research at their fingertips. Tumlis has just launched REALizer, a tool that provides agents with a better understanding of the market conditions surrounding a specific home at the neighborhood level. Tumlis founder & CEO Tom Horvath recently told Inman News that REALizer will help agents shed light on how to price specific homes for sellers and where their value lies for buyers. Utilizing geo-based listing data & a patent-pending predictive analytics dashboard REALizer can help agents determine:

• The value of a home.
• How soon a buyer or seller should take action.
• How long a property will remain on the market at the current asking price.
• How the price of a home influences its days on market.
• Whether a neighborhood be hot or not in the future.

Check out the screenshot below of REALizer or read more here.

Pocket Listings Technology, the ever increasing trend, catches on with HomeCanvasr

HomeCanvasr is taking on Brooklyn! After a previous launch in New Jersey, HomeCanvasr is steadily building marketplace liquidity with one small geographic area after another. Why is this relevant to the rest of you outside the New Jersey/New York kingdom? HomeCanvasr is a great example of the ever increasing out of the box real estate sales and marketing startups that are looking to compete in the major leagues of MLS engines.

HomeCanvasr aims to flip the traditional buy/sell model and give buyers access to properties before they hit the open market. New real estate marketing technology like social media, mobile CRM systems, and most recently the hotly debated Zillow “Coming Soon” feature, are all providing ways to market homes without the help of a multiple listing service.

While some are still debating if these tools are are good or bad for the industry, there’s no denying that the real estate industry has entered a whole new technological frontier. How will you compete?

Watch the HomeCanvasr Startup Spotlight below or read more at Curbed.com.

Social Media: More than just a trend in the home-buying process of the future

In the just released “2014 Survey of California Home Buyers” report from the California Association of Realtors, more U.S. home buyers are turning to social media in the home-buying process than ever before. More than three-fourths of home buyers used social media in their home search, up from 52 percent who used it in 2011.

Buyers said they primarily used social media to obtain buying tips and suggestions from friends (44 percent), neighborhood information (44 percent), and to view their agents’ Facebook pages (42 percent). Another interesting statistic, supporting the necessity of content creation for online realtor presence, is that nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of buyers who used an agent found their agent online, compared to only 38 percent who found their agent online in 2003.

Check out the infographic below from the California Association of Realtors or read more about the real estate sales and marketing in the California Home Buyer’s report at the World Property Channel.

RESAAS, the Real Estate Social Media Network, launches Advertising Engine

AdSAAS will allow businesses that provide services to the real estate industry — like realtors, home stagers, mortgage professionals, customer relationship management platform vendors etc.— to place ads within RESAAS’ Facebook-like feed. Firms can also use AdSAAS to help them place ads across the Web on sites like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

With the launch of AdSAAS, RESAAS, Real Estate Software as a Service, is opening up its platform to ads for the first time. RESAAS is a bit of a mashup of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with aims to be the social network for real estate. Read more here or watch this amusing mockumentary video below from RESAAS created to help coax old-school agents into adopting the latest real estate technology and social media tools.

Clearview’s Tuesday Tech Tip: Rapportive

Rapportive is a Gmail browser plugin that allows you to find email addresses for top influencers, clients and long lost college roommates. For the real estate sales & marketing, the most valuable offering of Rapportive is that you get to instantly see all of your potential client’s social media accounts in one place. People are busy. Maybe your call or email got lost in the shuffle. Why not warm up that cold lead and contact them via Facebook, or LinkedIn? Show them how much more technologically up to date you are compared to your competitors.

Lead followup is a delicate art. Contact too much and you’ve lost a sale. Contact too little and you’ve lost another one. Try the phone, try email, then if no response wait a few days and reach out via Facebook, wait a few more and try LinkedIn. I think you’ll be amazed by the results. Rapportive allows you to see all of your potential client’s social media accounts in one place, your Inbox. It’s free and you can download it here.