A home listed as being in foreclosure in California.

Consumers are turning more to websites to purchase real estate as new business opportunities emerge from the current market slump. Home buyers and home sellers alike can find more innovative and useful features than ever on real-estate websites, which are nimbly adapting to the housing slump.

For those poking around the real-estate market, it might be worthwhile to check out sites like buysiderealty.com, iggyshouse.com, zillow.com and trulia.com to see just how much online home shopping has changed lately.

In the past, most real-estate sites primarily offered property listing services.

That's no longer the case thanks to improved online mapping services and the spread of broadband connections, which have allowed sites to take advantage of new technology.

What's more, as a means to drum up business, real-estate sites have looked to expand their features to include services like alerts - 'heat maps' showing active sales areas, video postings, home estimates and Q&A forums. Some are even offering rebates to home buyers.

Chuck Cole, for instance, recently bought a home in Oakland, California, worth almost US$450,000 - and met his realtor just once through the entire month-long process.

Cole used the multiple listing service tool on buysiderealty.com to pick the properties he wanted to visit. Later, after deciding on a house and submitting an offer, he had a realtor from buysidereal ty.com handle the transaction.

For doing all the groundwork himself and bypassing a traditional realtor, Cole was rewarded with a rebate of over US$8,000, or 75 per cent of the buyer's commission that buysiderealty.com earned from the deal.

"We liked that everything was done pretty much by email and phone. When we've worked with realtors in the past, it was a big pain in the neck to try to connect with people in person and to have to go to their office," said Cole.

If you're looking to sell your house without using a real-estate agent, consider a visit to iggyshouse.com, a sister concern of buysiderealty.com.

The site lures sellers with freebies like a multiple listing service, a listing on realtor.com and posts on other sites. Home sellers once paid agents a premium for such services.

Iggyshouse.com also lets sellers and real-estate agents post photographs, videos and details about the property for sale - at no cost.

"With 75 or 80 per cent of sellers (also) being buyers, we know that if we give them this free service and they are self-directed enough to sell on their own, there is a pretty good chance that they'd want to use (the) buyside," said Joe Fox, chief executive of iggyshouse.com and buysiderealty.com.

Educating consumers

"We're basically giving a free service to educate consumers about another service that pays them to use it, and that's exactly what is happening today," said Fox.

Another website that has entered this increasingly crowded space is zillow.com, which launched in early 2006.

It not only offers free property listings, but also gives away a home-valuation service it calls Zestimate.

Pete Flint, CEO of trulia.com, says the housing market's downturn has played to the strengths of real-estate websites.

"Although it's unfortunate what's going on in the housing market, it's really the online sites that are benefiting because consumers are spending a little bit more time before they make decisions and traditional real-estate brokers are rethinking the way they're marketing themselves," Flint said.

"So the change in the housing market has forced a change both in consumer behaviour and forced a change within marketing activity for real-estate professionals and we are a perfect platform for them both," he added.

From property listings to online home sales