Terabitz, new player in the online real estate world, is taking a new tact with it’s 10 million dollar financing package. The company has created a digital dashboard application to help manage all of the facets included in moving to a new home or apartment. Instead of being a one way data source, Terabitz is looking to provide a drag and drop environment for managing all of the information that you will need when you move.
It is an interesting concept and I think it will have legs for the younger set of internet mavens, but for a site that has the potential to be plug and play and easy to use, it still inundates with data. I think if they gave the user a simple wizard to walk through to get started the application would have a better success rate where people could then manipulate the data to their specifications while having a baseline.
In a press release, Terabitz says that its service will do for online real estate what TiVo did for television, eBay did for auctions and iTunes did for music. It also takes a swipe at Zillow, the Seattle online home valuation service that has raised $57 million to date.
“People need an easy way to manage the dozens of sources of information that comprise a move. Companies such as Zillow have attempted to solve this problem, but offer only single, narrow solutions,” says Chief Executive Ashfaq Munshi, the former chief executive of Level5 Networks and father of Kamran Munshi.
The company says its site, which can be customized by each user, will include property listings as well as neighborhood information related to hospitals, libraries, theaters, restaurants and crime statistics. Users can drag information — say fast food restaurants, for sale listings or cafes — into an online workspace.
That information can then be loaded onto a Google Map, so a user could see how close a home is to a McDonald’s (shown as a hamburger icon), an elementary school (shown as a yellow sign), a cafe (shown as a coffee cup) or other neighborhood businesses. Along with homes from the MLS, the site also integrates property listings from CraigsList and Google. It also offers the tax assessment for each property and notes comparable homes that have sold nearby. via John Cook’s Venture Blog
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