This post contains a delicious dwellicious tip at the end.
See houses you like on Realtor.com? Craigslist, RE/Max or Zillow.com? Click and save them to Dwellicious.com, a new bookmarking website set to launch in January 2009. (You can sign up for a beta account now.)
Screw the Website, Show Me The Listings
The National Association of Realtors (NAR) has told us what we already know– homebuyers visit many real estate websites when searching for a home. And let’s face it. Folks don’t care about the real estate websites– they care about the real estate listings.
As things stand right, home buyers have to endure great pains to:
(1) find real estate websites
(2) navigate and search those sites
(3) somehow save and keep track of the houses they like — either by saving them on the individual sites (sucks) or, as many folks do, printing them out and putting them in a folder (to eventually misplace) and
4) revisit the websites & listings from time to time to see if anything changed such as price, or still on the market (also sucks).
Until someone creates a Dogpile real estate metasearch engine that searches ALL those pesky real estate websites from one location, buyers are stuck with the tedious (1) and (2).
BUT someone has figured out any easy way to do (3) and (4): Dwellicious.com
What is Dwellicious?
Dwellicious is a real estate bookmarking site which lets you easily collect, organize, share, and comment on the home listings you find on various real estate websites. It’s FREE.
With Dwellicious you will be able to:
1. Create a free account/bookmarks page. The URL will look something like this: http://dwellicious.com/sellsius. This is where all your saved homes will be stored (not on your computer). Send this link to others to share your bookmarks.
2. Easily bookmark (saved) and organize (tag) real estate listings
3. Share your bookmarked listings with others.
4. Edit your bookmarked listings.
5. See updates of your bookmarked listings, such as price reductions
6. See others public bookmarked listings
Here is the current list of real estate sites you can visit to collect listings for you dwellicious account (more are coming):
Bookmarklet: 
Saving listings is easy if you use the neat little bookmarklet which you can drag to your toolbar. When you see a property that catches your fancy — BAM– click the bookmarklet to save it to your dwellicious account. Easy.
OK, here’s how you do it. First, find a real estate listing you like. Here’s one I found on
Zillow.com (I’ll still get change from my $3 million):
I clicked the “add to dwellicious” bookmarklet on my toolbar and saw this screen. I added Notes and some tags to help me identify it later. Tag Tip: Put phrase in quotes to create a phrase tag “Upper east side”
Note: Check the privacy box if you don not want other folks to see your bookmarked listings.
After clicking “Create”, my bookmark looks like this: (click image to enlarge). I can delete or edit the bookmark at any time.
I can click to see the Details of my bookmarked house: (click image to enlarge)
In the Details, there are tabs you can click to see the property on a map, neighborhood info, school info, property valuation, recent area home sales and more to help you with your home buying decision. If you shared the listings with friends and family, you can see their comments here too.
What Makes Dwellicious Smart:
A. Updated Property Changes
With traditional bookmarking you just bookmark a site you like and you want to visit again. When you bookmark a real estate listing, that listing might not be there next week or the price might have dropped. Problem? Not with Dwellicious.
Dwellicious updates any changes made to bookmarked listings, such as price reductions, new photos or whether the property is off the market.
B. Listings RSS Feed
This is a nice feature to keep tabs on newly added bookmarks. Working like an Alert, real estate agents and their buyers (who have a feedreader) might use this to keep abreast of newly added homes.
I signed up for the account and took it for a test drive. So far, it works as advertised (I have not witnessed a property update yet but am looking forward to seeing how that works).
Dwellicious is a great tool that makes you wonder: Why the heck didn’t I think of that?
Good luck.
Visit the Dwellicious blog here.
For the diligent reader, this dwellicious tip:
Although dwellicious was meant to save real estate listings, you can, in fact, bookmark anything– blog posts, photos, web pages or anything on the web with a URL. It will be stored in your bookmarks but will not be made publicly viewable. (See below: click image to enlarge). This is also useful if a want to save a listing from a site which is not on the dwellicious list.
Technorati Tags: dwellicious, bookmarking, sellsius
