Moovest, a newly launched search site for investment properties, is banking on the power of bovine branding to spur its growth.

"When considering real estate, bovine (more commonly known as cattle), don't usually spring to mind," according to the company's announcement today. "We wanted something both unusual and memorable," said Dave Segrove, vice president of marketing for Moovest.com, in a statement.

The site caters to buyers and sellers of tenant-occupied real estate, or homes and buildings that are currently rented or leased by the owner, though the site does not require that properties have tenants in order to be listed at the site.

Real estate agents can participate at the site through a "MoovAgent" service that connects them with prospective buyers, according to the announcement. The site doesn't seem to have much content and/or functionality yet, though there are some pretty pictures of the site's cow mascots in some exotic and some not-so-exotic locations.

StopWandering.com, a Web site now in beta, displays real estate listings in proximity to synagogues in the United States. Another site, ShalomHome.com, offers referrals to real estate professionals who offer to guide clients to synagogues and other resources in a community.

There are a range of faith-focused real estate sites on the Internet: MuslimRealEstate.com offers a "One Stop Shop" for Muslim real estate services, according to a Web site description, "From apartments to mansions to masjids (mosques)."

Other faith-based real estate sites include LDSRealtorOC.com, LDSAgents.com; the Christian Real Estate Network at HisMove.com; and Christian Real Estate Brokers Association at http://www.americanchristians.org/ChristianRealEstateBrokers.htm.

Meanwhile, religious preference was a topic in a legal case filed by a Chicago lawyers' group against online classifieds and community site craigslist.org. The lawyers' group, which alleged craigslist violated the federal Fair Housing Act, objected to the phrase "Catholic Church and beautiful Buddhist Temple within one block" in a post at the site as a sign of religious preference, for example, while craigslist viewed the example as "helping people zero in on properties most attractive to their preferences and no more implying exclusion than 'elementary school within five minutes' walk,'" according to an opinion issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals in that case. Craigslist ultimately prevailed in the case, as the court found craiglist was just a messenger and not liable for discriminatory posts by site users (see Inman News report).

Real estate Web sites' competition for eyeballs is getting serious -- Move Inc. is using eye-tracking studies to gauge how users interact with the redesigned Realtor.com site, now in beta.

Move Inc. officials, in a presentation today at the JP Morgan 36th Annual Technology Conference in Boston, will discuss the redesign and other company and industry developments.

The eye-tracking technology is a useful gauge for figuring out what consumers are paying the most attention to when visiting the Web site, said Errol Samuelson, Realtor.com president.

The technology features a camera that tracks eye movement, and Web page areas receive points in the test when the eyes linger there.

Tests of this technology on the existing Realtor.com site and the beta version of the site found that there is a 70 percent increase in view time at the new site, with 42 percent more properties viewed.

Employees at a research and development office that Move opened last year in California's Silicon Valley have had past experience using eye-tracking techniques, Samuelson said, and online companies like eBay and Google are among those that use the tests. (Note: the image here is from the film "Clockwork Orange," not from Move's R&D center.)

See this earlier blog post for some comments by Samuelson about online real estate.

Joel Burslem has been keeping a close watch on Google's stealthy moves in the real estate space on his blog, Future of Real Estate Marketing. Not only has Google been adding property listings from many sources to classified platform Google Base, but they've created a generic Google Base housing search page -- a possible step toward a "Google Real Estate" portal, Burslem thinks.

Now Burslem notes that Google is quietly pushing listings onto Google Maps and has created a real estate search category. For now, listings appear sparse, Burslem says, but it's easy to imagine "how this could quickly fill up should they turn on the firehose of data (Google has) been accumulating from their broker relationships."

Burslem says Google Maps is already part of his routine when scoping out homes, because it helps him get a feel for the neighborhood a listing is located. Now, he says, it's looking like "Google Maps is going to be my new real estate search page."

To see Google Maps real estate search in action, go to Google Maps, and type the name of a city and "real estate." Or you can click on the tiny blue letters next to the search box, "Show search options," which opens up a pull-down menu that offers to "Restrict results to." Select "real estate" and go to town (right click the screen shot above for an example).

EBay is suing Craigslist, an online classified advertising network in which the Internet auction company owns a minority interest, news sources reported Tuesday.

San Jose, Calif.-based eBay alleged in a lawsuit filed in Delaware that Craigslist's directors -- founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster -- took actions that unfairly diluted eBay's economic interest in the company, according to news sources.

In 2004, eBay bought a 28 percent minority interest in Craigslist from an unnamed former executive.

EBay is asking Delaware's Court of Chancery to negate the Craigslist board's actions, but failed to disclose to news sources the specifics of those actions.

For now, the lawsuit is under seal, according to the AP, because of confidentiality restrictions, but eBay says that Craigslist could ask the court to make the complaint publicly available.

The AP further reports that a Craigslist spokeswoman said the company would likely post a response to the lawsuit later Tuesday on its Web site.

Craigslist has become a powerhouse site for advertising real estate listings, with more and more agents turning to the site for added exposure to buyers looking online. Property listings are free to list on Craigslist in all markets except New York, where brokers must pay $10 per listing.

The classifieds site recently put forth a proposal to limit the HTML that can be used in listings as a way to help ward off spam. Some real estate folks have been discussing the proposal and how it would impact various real estate listings services should it go through. Join the discussion at this link.

The National Association of Realtors today announced approval of a draft standard for real estate data exchange, with buy-in from a long list of industry representatives.

The effort builds on the Real Estate Transaction Standard, or RETS, an effort that NAR sparked in 1999.

Some big players are a part of this standardization effort: Google, Move Inc., RealEstate.com, Trulia, Yahoo, Zillow, and some big MLSs and industry vendors. RETS adoption will become mandatory for all Realtor-affiliated MLSs by the middle of next year, and earlier this year a group of online companies announced a collaborative push for adoption of data standards.

The concept is simple: to make it easier for brokers, MLSs, vendors and others to exchange property data across a variety of different platforms.

The Virginia Association of Realtors has launched IdealRoute.com, an online tool that allows users to identify the most efficient travel route for a group of selected addresses anywhere in the United States. Sounds like a good way for real estate agents to potentially cut down their fuel costs while taking clients to see several properties. Or maybe just a useful tool to plan business or personal errands.

Users can click on the interactive map to select travel points, and can also type in addresses. Once all of the addresses are entered, the tool calculates the most efficient route to visit all of the selected addresses and provides driving directions.

The routing tool was developed by Daniel R. Odio, the founder of Alexandria, Va.-based DROdio Real Estate Inc., and licensed to the association. A regional version of the tool is available at DROdio's TheBestHomeSearchEver.com and TBHSE.com Web sites (see previous blog post).

Read more about the tool at the VARBuzz.com site.

BlueRoof, a Salt Lake City brokerage company with a slick Web site that launched in 2006, has spawned a new company that focuses on Web design, lead management, networking and consulting: BlueRoof360.

Greg Tracy, a real estate industry veteran who founded BlueRoof, is now devoted to this new venture that allows real estate professionals to customize their real estate Web sites using a series of pre-built components.

Tracy told Inman News this week that there are now about 700 agents on the BlueRoof360 system. He said "agents (and brokers) want a better option than templates and don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a custom site."

Among the Web site functions available through the new company: map-based search, instant chat and online video.

A shareholder group representing about 6.6 percent of stock in Realtor.com operator Move Inc. wants the company's board to boot CEO Mike Long and CFO Lewis R. Belote III based on a multi-million-dollar investment that the company said last week is currently illiquid (see Inman News report).

The company has about $130 million wrapped up in auction-rate securities issued by student loan financing organizations, according to an earnings announcement last week, and the market for those securities is in a troubled state.

Real estate brokerage and franchise company Realogy Corp. is casting a very wide net on the 'Net these days, pumping its property listings out to many online sites. The company last year announced distribution agreements to share online property listings information with Google and Trulia, and more recently announced similar agreements to bring hundreds of thousands of property listings to Cyberhomes.com, Zillow.com, AOL, Homescape and FrontDoor, a real estate search site launched by HGTV operator Scripps Networks Interactive. Realogy brands include Century 21, Coldwell Banker, ERA and Sotheby's International Realty, among others.

The Internet is considered by some to be a great equalizer, with big and small companies competing side by side in cyberspace for the same consumers. And there is a movement to create data standards to assist brokers of all sizes in sending out real estate listings content to multiple sites, with online players such as Trulia, Zillow and Yahoo Real Estate on board with the effort. Some third-party companies are already serving as the go-between to assist brokers in dishing out content to a range of online sites.

But do all small real estate companies have the time and resources to supply updated data feeds to these various online sites -- or is this an easier feat for super-sized national brokerage companies? Are smaller companies at any disadvantage here as the larger companies push their real estate listings content out to any and all takers in massive data feeds?

(photo by wchien)