homeinblog – news from homein.com real estate search portal

homein.com real estate search website is now available in Italian aswell as English, Spanish and German.
homein.com sito di ricerca immobiliare è ora disponibile in italiano oltre che in inglese, spagnolo e tedesco.

Welcome to our Italian visitors!
Benvenuti ai nostri visitatori italiani!

Real estate agents in Italy interested in working with homein.com should contact commercial director Alex Urbiola, who speaks italian perfectly on alex.urbiola@homein.com
Gli agenti immobiliari in Italia interessati a lavorare con homein.com devono contattare Direttore Commerciale Alex Urbiola, che parla perfettamente l’italiano sulla alex.urbiola @ homein.com

2009 has been an exciting year at homein.com. Amongst the things we’ve done we’ve migrated from Microsoft .NET to PHP, the visual map search has become faster and the look and feel on the homepage has changed. We’ve also gone from offering property for sale in 5 locations in Spain to over 30 of the main Spanish cities and towns and areas.

Recently we launched our currency converter tool to let property hunters get a better feel for the property prices in their own currency. This also means that real estate agents now also can upload properties in their own currency.

homein.com has been selected as an advertising platform for banks like Santander, http://www.homein.com/estate-agent/altamira-santander-real-estate/ and Caixa Sabadell, http://www.homein.com/es/inmobiliaria/caixa-sabadell/ who now have thousands of properties to sell due the economic crisis of 2009.

If you are a real estate agent outside of Spain in a destination not currently offered by homein.com then please contact our commercial director Alex on alex.urbiola@homein.com . We’re giving free trials to the first 3 real estate agents that signup on new destinations!

We have several exciting improvements planned for 2010, thanks for your interest in homein.com during 2009, happy holidays to you all.

We now give you the option to choose the currency you want to show your prices in, a nice little feature to help you find your home easier. Check it out on www.homein.com

Following hot on the heels of the new home page design (now with the typical easy-to-use homein.com map navigation) we have updated the design of the search box in the left column.

The homein.com property search box is now in our cool corporate green colour and has been simplified to help users find the property they are looking for. A bigger title of the property search box makes it clearer for the user of what the can search here and to finish off this round of clean up we’ve removed the minimum price field, i mean, who decieds they ‘don’t want to spend LESS than X amount’

Take a look for yourself here: www.homein.com/spain/costa-brava-girona

More design update touches coming soon, to make homein.com real estate search even easier.
homein.com is rocking its way through the real estate crisis!

Recently our developer Victor spent some time on implementing a new idea Paul has had for the  homepage look and feel. The new version shows a Google map with all destinations were homein is currently active. To check it out just go to http://www.homein.com/ .

But wait a minute, Dublin is also there. Yes that’s right, homein has done a soft launch in Dublin so if you’re planning to buy property over there us out, www.homein.com/ireland/dublin/ .

at homein.com – the spanish property portal we like to test our site on real people.

Please help us to refine our design, try this 5 second test: http://fivesecondtest.com/test/V9z0enAz

We really appreciate all of you who do this.

participate right now if you like, it will only take 5 seconds… quite literally!

click here to test: http://fivesecondtest.com/test/t4GQfCel

usability testing is one of our major considerations here at homein.com – the user is always right afterall!

homein.com Commercial Director Alex Urbiola and Managing Director Paul Lupson visited the annual real estate event ‘Barcelona Meeting Point’ last week.

Alex quickly made some very promising contacts with some very well know Banks that have rather unwittingly become real estate agents due to the amount of reposessions being made during the economic downturn.

The banks, including giant Santander, seem keen to use portals such as homein.com to advertise the large stock of apartments and houses they have for sale.

Servihabitat, the real estate arm of one of Spains largest banks ‘La Caixa’ is already advertising with homein.com and has 100’s of properties online., and example can be seen here: http://www.homein.com/spain/madrid/

Right on schedule homein.coms’ entire code base was migrated from .net to php on November 1st 2009.

The benefits of the site now using php programming language are immediately obvious with the site being 50% faster to load and use. Clearly this speed increase means homein.com users can now search for their real estate even quicker than before.

Big thanks to Technical Director Cristian Suazo and his dedicated team completing this task. A faster, leaner, quicker loading homein.com is just what’s needed as the site continues it’s relentless move forward.