Iggyshouse.com Gets Into The Game

Zillow, Meet Iggy. Iggy, Meet Zillow.

Love these catchy little Web 2.0 names.

This is not a rural land site, but it is a worthwhile entry into the amazingly warp-speed morphing/evolving/competitive world of online real estate search/list/buy/sell sites. Everyone wants a piece of this MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR industry!!

Today’s offering really is TODAY’s offering. Iggyshouse.com launched its beta release, like, a few hours ago.

What they say about themselves:

“Iggys House offers consumers free access to the MLS, and an easy-to-use tutorial to help them create their own listing. Their home will be listed for free on the MLS, and placed on both Iggyshouse.com and REALTOR.COM®, where over 50% of prospective home buyers shop for new homes. Other companies offer to help self-motivated sellers sell their home, but only do so for a fee. Iggys House will be the first and only real estate brokerage to offer this service for absolutely no charge.

Thanks to BuySide Realty and Iggys House, buying and selling real estate will never be the same.

It’ll be better.”

Here is the Buyside.com info:

“Thanks to the Internet, consumers are now empowered with the information they need to find their own home. In fact, of the 7.1 million existing homes purchased in 2005, 2.9 million of these buyers found their home on their own and then turned to a real estate agent for help in making offers and closing the sale. Arguably, it is one of the agent’s primary values to help the consumer find the home they want to buy. “

PREDICTION: Iggy Is Gonna Be A Playah! 

It may take the baton from sites like Redfin, Yahoo!, realestateabc.com and other web-based listing services whose signs have cropped up all over the place.

Clickin’ Good Fun in Tennessee

We’re always looking for rural land sellers who raise the bar on search and site usability. Well, today, we head to Marion County, Tennessee, to a place called Timberlake at Sewanee. These folks make you want to spend all day playing around on their land-sale site. These are some very cool interactive tools!

Sales Pitch:

“With retreat sites ranging from five to more than 50 acres, residents have the space and freedom to invest in prime real estate on an uncommon scope and scale. With bluff, forest and lakefront land available, remarkable beauty is also paired with exceptional value, as homebuyers can benefit from no personal state income tax and very low real estate and property taxes. The result is an extraordinary opportunity for individuals and families to claim a special place where memories are made for a lifetime. “

The fact is, the sales text on this site is almost superfluous, considering how cool it is to click around and check out parcels. Timberlake features mountain parcels ranging from 5 to 50 acres. You can waste all kinds of time clicking onto different parcels, which pull out the lot’s size and shape.

Turning Water into Google’s Wine

When Yahoo! broke ground in Quincy, Washington on a new server farm, land prices in the lunar/rural section of central Washington shot up, oh, a million percent — at least according to some long-time landowners in the high desert region. LandCrazed covered that topic in an earlier post.

Now the big server farm news is out of North Carolina, where Google has wrangled a quarter billion dollars in tax incentives to locate a data center in Caldwell County.

“Last month, the Internet search giant Google announced that it would take advantage of the area’s underused electric power grid, cheap land and robust water supply to build a “server farm” — a building full of computers that will become part of the company’s worldwide network. “ The New York Times.

Unlike the Yahoo! deal in Quincy, which turned unimproved ranch land into a brand-new business opportunity, the Google deal in Lenoir, N.C. was sold as a way to regenerate a struggling local economy, built on furniture making. There’s tremendous room for interpretation about whether Google’s allure (and negotiating tactics) is far, far better for Google than for Caldwell County, but that’s a discussion for another blog.

On the outskirts of Lenoir, stats show that the average farm (family-owned) is an average of 85 acres. That would put this listing by Apple Creek Homes for 81 acres @ $8,500 an acre in the ballpark. There appears to be a tsunami of half-acre lots at around $12-$20K each. Then there is this 139-acre parcel for $1.1 million. The description starts like this: “Investors!”

Maybe the Google Boyz will want a mountain view in the Tar Heel state? It’s the LEAST they can do.

link farmer starts openland.com

Look at what we found last night! A link farm like we’ve yet to see for land search.

It has no personality. It has no content. It appears to have been created by “Jeff”, Tang –“a developer in the software development business for over 12 years. Hes been a principal software engineer, senior software engineer, and consultant at both start-ups and Fortune 500 companies.” — Amazon.com book blurb bio.

Look at the future …

Here it is (SEE ABOVE.) Plain and simple. A neat little e-mail notice from the North American Land Company that popped into my queue this morning. They are not listing service but a rural land developer, which gives them a particularly coherent business plan and point of view.

Let me tell you, my spam filters are high. I am big-time fan & user of the UNSUBSCRIBE option on almost every single company that finds its way to my e-mail box. BUT, when it comes to the way in which land owners are trying to talk to me about rural lots … I am looking.

Am I alone? Are thousands of other online junkies with a penchant for rural land eager to see one or two choice parcels/offerings pop into their mailbox? You gotta think … The key word for me is is one or two, maybe three listings/offerings. If e-mail notices became a deluge, it would be a total turnoff.

This is EXACTLY what I’m talking about on LandCrazed.wordpress.com. This blog is totally dedicated to the ways in which technology, information, human interest and rural land WILL find a way to marry.

Here comes the bride!

Total Freaking Eye Candy!

The power of land is that conjures up feelings beyond words. Writers can TRY and evoke what land SAYS and MEANS, but their striving to describe the setting and the feelings evoked almost always falls short.

So what’s the point? Here’s the point:

The PRETTIEST rural land and ranch listing site LandCrazed has EVER seen — bar none — belongs to Hall and Hall, out of Billings, Montana. What they have is ART.

Capital A-R-T.

‘NUFF SAID!

What’s it worth to list land?

A little mole tells me that Landandfarm.com is raising prices. Premium listing ads are going from $49.95/month to $79.95/month and banner ads are going from $50/month to $175/month.

Landandfarm.com has about 3,800 land listings, making it one of the bigger fish in the rural land pond. Can they continue to grow? We’ll see, since the trend in Web 2.0 real estate is to provide INFORMATION for consumers with as few encumbrances as possible.

Just a hunch, but the more savvy buyers get, and the more eagerly they surf the net for land listings, the less seller$ might be willing to $hell out.

One other criticism of Landandfarm.com, which has some cool listings no doubt: But they have a confusing point of entry/portal situation the way they use FOUR other sites through which buyers can access the same listings database.

Landandfarm.com has a niche/target audience, something LoopNet can’t address with their commercial-heavy presentation, but the question is how long — if sellers see other (CHEAPER) options.

Total Acreage in America!

This land is my land. This land is your land. This land is made up of 2.3 billion acres of land.

Love that number. And love this website: StateMaster.com

“More than just a mere collection of various data, StateMaster goes beyond the numbers to provide you with visualization technology like pie charts, maps, graphs and scatterplots. We also have thousands of map and flag images, state profiles, and correlations.”

Land lovers can check out cool data under the Geography category, which breaks down acreage in the U.S. in a variety of ways

An overview of U.S. land mass shows that while the U.S. has 2.3 billion acres of land, 375 million acres are in Alaska and not suitable for agricultural production. The land area of the lower 48 states is approximately 1.9 billion acres. (California is 103 million acres, Montana 94 million acres, Oregon 60 million acres and Maine 20 million acres.)Rural and residential land is only a tiny slice (about 7 percent) of the total U.S. land mass.

Must be some nice pastures out there waiting …

Yahoo! Land Rush in ‘Scab Land’

Yahoo! and Microsoft are building huge server farms in Quincy, Washington, using the amazingly cheap hydro power from the Grand Coulee dam to service the hungry data stream. That means the vast, lunar acreage in central Washington has turned into, well, very green acres.

“It’s had an impact,” said Brian Hayek, sales associate for Washington Land & Ranch out of Moses Lake.

“My grandfather owned about 2,300 acres between Wenatchee and Moses Lake, near Quincy. He bought it in the 30’s and ’40s for $125 an acre. They called it scab land, but now I have family members who’re sure the property is worth $4 million an acre,” Hayek said, laughing.

OK, $4 million is exaggeration, but people still think central Washington could be the next Bend, Oregon.

Washington Land & Ranch sells parcels from 40 to 80 acres. They opened their doors on Nov. 15, 2006 and have already sold 26 parcels, closer to Moses Lake, due east of Quincy.

“Prices have tripled and quadrupled,” Hayek said. “When the big people with Yahoo! and Mircosoft start looking around, other people follow. I am very optimistic, with more people looking to move out of the traffic and rain of Western Washington, out to where its sunny 300 days a year. They’re talking about building a Target and strip malls in Grant County, something unheard of before.”

As for Yahoo!, they’re still so enthralled with their new digs in Quincy that on Jan. 2, the mayor and city council discussed what they should do with nice, big gift bags that Yahoo! had sent over. No, it wasn’t cool for city officials to keep the graft from the search engine giant, but the council did vote to keep the Yahoo! gift for local charity.

Feeling good in the Quincy neighborhood, that’s for sure.

Digital mapping for land lovers

When will the Zillow for land enter the real estate market?

If data and information are the key to the Web 2.0 way of doing business, then no one is going to go far without innovative and excellent mapping tools. Here’s a couple of services that could make for a brilliant mash-up for farm and rural land sellers:

www.digitalmapproducts.com/products/DMP_LandVision_Product_Sheet.pdf

www.landinfo.com/usa.htm 

Hello? How long before someone comes up with THE service that will force land owners and buyers to meet in cyberspace?