Coldwell Banker Wants to Ship Me to Aruba

December 4, 2009 at 3:22 am PT

The Internet is aswarm with listings of homes for sale. Even Overstock.com (OSTK) has them, appropriately enough in today’s glutted housing market.

So how is a real-estate broker to draw Web traffic to yet another listings site?

Coldwell Banker Real Estate has just launched a beta site whose features include something called BlueScape, designed to help you figure out what kind of home you’d adore. The idea is loosely based on features from other shopping sites, such as Amazon (AMZN) and Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes, that recommend things to you based on what you bought in the past. Even though iTunes recently had the nerve to suggest I might dig Barry Manilow, I decided to have a go at BlueScape.

Since BlueScape doesn’t know what kind of homes I bought in the past (none of them were bought online), it shows me pictures to gauge my emotional responses. When a picture pops up, I can click on a thumb’s up icon or a thumb’s down.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Tagged with: Amazon, BlueScape, Coldwell Banker Real Estate, developments, digital, Digits, economy, emotional response, frontpage, innovation, Internet, iTunes, James R. Hagerty, listings site, Overstock.com, real estate brokers, software, The Wall Street Journal, Web traffic

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