Popular heatmap mashup Neighboroo (see Top 10 Real Estate 2.0 Sites) rolled out a new version of their site today, adding a slew of new features and rolling in a couple new data sources and overall, a much tighter design.
In its previous form, Neighboroo took publicly available data (largely from census data) and plotted it visually on a Google Maps interface. In its latest incarnation, it adds property data (housing costs) from Trulia, real time market activity (in select markets) from Altos Research and neighborhood video from Turnhere.
All of this content makes researching a neighborhood on Neighboroo a particularly rich experience. I could definitely see this site being useful to someone facing a major relocation or looking to move to a new city.
A search can start with a zip code or just by navigating the map interface. There is a secondary search page that allows you to break down a search into numerous color coded criteria, but unfortunately I found this kind of confusing and overly complex. An interesting concept that just doesn’t translate into a particularly usable interface, in my opinion.
In this release they’ve also rolled out Local Sponsorship opportunities, presumably for small businesses to advertise on individual zip codes. The setup apes Zillow’s new EZAds and are just a good a deal; sponsorship is little more than $1/day. Pretty affordable advertising really and a reasonable revenue stream for the young company.
This is just the type of site that one of the major real estate portals, someone like Yahoo! Real Estate, MSN or AOL would do well to acquire. Neighboroo, with scrappy attitude and some smart partnerships has built a compelling, sticky research tool that beats out most of what those mainstream media portals currently offer.
More coverage: Inman News Blog
