Propertyqube Launches PropertyLife - Local Real Estate Portals

Last week I met with David Bethoney, co-founder of NY-based Propertyqube. Propertyqube describes the service as a real estate relationship network. David noted that Propertyqube has more listings than any other online real estate site because they pull their listings from Google Base. They have over 3 million homes listed and 600,000 apartment listings. And with the home foreclosure market sadly booming, they have hundreds of thousands of foreclosure listings as well.

They have raised $100,000 in angel funding from two investors and launched the site just over a month ago.

We spoke about the differences between Propertyqube and the other highly-funded popular online real estate sites including Trulia. David explained that Trulia is focused on individual transactions while Propertyqube is focused on creating long-term relationships through blogs, photos and past transactional information.

Today Propertyqube is making two announcements regarding new features within the service.

The first is that agents can now brand their Google Base listings which will make the listings more personal. The listings will feature a contact widget with her name, photo and expertise along with the local blog that are part of Propertyqube.

The second new feature is "PropertyLife" which is basically everything happening around the locations you are interested in. It's basically a local product that brings together content from various sources including many of the content offerings from Propertyqube. One piece of PropertyLife that I like is that they will accept local real estate blogs and show them on the appropriate PropertyLife pages. It's a great way for local real estate blogs to gain wider distribution. Here's an example PropertyLife page - from California.

When we ended our discussion, David shared his company tagline with me. It is, "Propertyqube to help people discover and share real estate information in a fun way." To be honest, I am not crazy about the word "fun" in this business sense - seems to lessen the value of what Propertyqube provides.