For some reason I had it in my head that making ringtones from the music that I had in my iTunes program was going to be easy. Fail! As it turns out, no matter what Steve Jobs and the rest of that gang over at Apple tells you, it’s not that easy of a task.

Let’s follow along as I show you what I discovered and you will learn how to create an iPhone ringtone out of any audio file on your hard drive.

To start with, you CAN use iTunes to make a ringtone for you from existing songs in iTunes. Just right click on the song and select “Create Ringtone”. Fail! If you picked a song that you loaded from somewhere other than the iTunes store, you get the message: “You can create iPhone ringtones only from songs purchased from the iTunes store.”

OK, fair enough, I suppose. Even though I hated the idea of paying for a ringtone from a song that I already owned, I figured I’d do it just so I could have what I wanted. So I went to my “Purchased” Playlist and select a song and right click on it. Pretty soon it starts to process the song, but then I get this message:

“The name of the song” by “the artist” can no longer be made into a ringtone” Fail!

When COULD it be made into a ringtone? Who knows and at this point I am steamed….

So, I did some research and discovered that the default settings for iTunes imports songs into the library as AAC encoded, which gives the songs an m4a extension. Ringtones have an m4r extension. Hmmm, would changing the extension create a ringtone? As it turns out it does!

So here is how to create ringtones for iPhone in iTunes:

You do want to limit the length of the song to 30 seconds and it turns out that iTunes will do this for you. Pick the song that you want, right click on it and select “Get Info”. Then under the “Options” tab you can select the start time and the stop time in seconds. Be sure to check both boxes. This method is crude in that you can’t preview the selection until after you hit ok and then go listen to the song.  By trial and error you will eventually get the right 30 seconds.

Then you have to locate where the song is stored on your hard drive so that you can change its extension.  Go back to “Get Info”.  On the “Summary” tab you will find “Where” which gives you the path to the song.  You can also see if it has an m4a extension here as well.

If the song was purchased from iTunes and saved with AAC encoding, then you have to strip the DRM from it first.  There are third party software apps that will do this for you, but it’s just easier to create a new playlist in iTunes, put all the songs that you want to turn into ringtones into that playlist and then use iTunes to burn a CD. Once the CD is burned, import the songs back into iTunes using AAC encoding. You can select how a song is imported from a CD by going to “Edit”, then selecting “Preferences”, then select “Import Settings”, then select “AAC Encoder” under “Import Using”

If you have the songs saved as mp3, follow the same instructions as above.  Put them into a playlist, burn to CD using iTunes, and then import back into iTunes using AAC encoding.

After you have imported the songs back into your iTunes library you are almost done. Double clicking on the newly named file will cause iTunes to load it as a ringtone. If it didn’t already exist, a new folder called Ringtones is established and then the new ringtone is stored there.

Then all you have to do is to sync your iPhone with iTunes being sure to tell iTunes that you want to sync the Ringtones as well.

Now your ringtones are on the iPhone. Select a contact, hit edit and you can choose the ringtone to associate with that contact.

Whew!  Thanks Steve, that was fun!

These instructions work with Windows. Presumably the same concept will work on a Mac, although the exact steps will be different. I know that there are programs that you can buy to do this and that there are websites that will do it for you, but I wanted to do it for free and with what I already had on hand.

How about you? Do you have an easier way? If so, tell us about it!

There have been many articles written about business apps, fun apps, games and so on, so this article will not talk about them. What I want to talk about are the 5 apps that I cannot live without. In the few short months that I have had the iPhone I have to come to rely on one or more of these apps every day. Maybe you will too!

Facebook App

Ok, so I use Facebook”¦and I love the fact that the Facebook app gives me access to my Facebook friends, mail and I can also chat with them via the app on the iPhone. I can write on my friend’s walls, view their photo albums and see their full profiles. (Free)

Get Facebook App (iTunes)

LinkedIn App

Not to be outdone, LinkedIn also has an iPhone app that although not as robust as the Facebook app, still does a great job of giving me mobile access to my LinkedIn contacts, Updates and Status’s of my Connections. (Free)

Get LinkedIn App (iTunes)

Yelp App

My day job as a Trainer for Pacifc Union GMAC Real Estate has me traveling all over the Bay Area each week. And since I have been on a major weight loss program, I have been very particular about what I eat. The Yelp app gives me mobile access to the Yelp database of reviews on all sorts of restaurants and many other services. I can always find that great restaurant with the best salads no matter where I am! (Free)

Get Yelp App (iTunes)

Whitepages App

I’ve always been irked about having to pay for “Information Calls” as I am old enough to remember when these were free and you always got a friendly operator to help you find someone’s phone number. This app helps solve that problem in the US. It does it’s best to locate someone’s phone number by searching a database of 180 million US adults.

But, that’s not the best feature…it is also a Reverse Directory. In other words, put in a phone number and if the number is listed, the app returns the street address registered to that phone number. We used to have to pay big bucks for that reverse directory feature from a third party company. (Free)

Get Whitepages App (iTunes)

WordPress for iPhone

This little gem is a bloggers dream come true. I can write a blog post to my blog using my iPhone and this app handles publishing it to the blog! It works with wordpress.com and self hosted wordpress installations. It can insert pics from my camera or from the pictures in my phone’s library. It supports multiple blogs, multiple categories, allows me to edit exsiting posts, set tags, set categories, in short, I can blog to my heart’s content from wherever I happen to be! (Free)

Get WordPress App (iTunes)

All of these apps can be found on the iTunes store and do not require a jail broken phone. I use one or more of these every day and they are definitely my 5 favorite free apps. What are yours?

After I tell you what I don’t like, I’ll tell some things that I really do like about it! Feel free to tell me if you agree or disagree!

What I don’t like about the iPhone

Number 1 ““ No ability to cut and paste or copy and paste!

This is my number one complaint. There is no way to cut or copy or paste! Come on now Apple, what were you thinking? This is a feature that was very successfully implemented in Windows SmartPhones and is in every computer application in popular use. There is no way to copy items from a web page, email or any other application and then paste it elsewhere! This faux pas just boggles my mind.

Number 2 ““ There’s no proprietary BlueTooth stack that will talk to my Bluetooth Keyboard

I got very used to using my ThinkOutside Bluetooth Keyboard with my Windows SmartPhone. If I had to type more than a few words, I unlimbered the keyboard and in mere moments I was typing away. In fairness to Apple, I have gotten used to “typing” with my index finger on the virtual keyboard on the iPhone, but there is nothing like typing on real keys. How about it Apple, can you bring the Bluetooth Stack up to standards that everyone else uses? It would also be nice to be able to use my stereo Bluetooth headset with iTunes on the iPhone”¦

Number 3 ““ The battery is not replaceable!

OK, this phone is power hungry and I am not always able to run to a charger when it runs low on battery power, and I hate the idea of turning off services just to conserve battery power. My other phones all had replaceable batteries which allowed me to carry a spare, fully charged battery. That way all I had to do was power down, swap the discharged battery for the fully charged spare, power back up and I was good to go.

The other reason I”˜d like to see user replaceable batteries is that sooner or later the battery will fail. When the iPhone battery fails it is off to the Apple Store I go, and they will have to send the phone out to get the batteries replaced. How many days will that keep my phone away from me?

Number 4 – Sub standard camera

This is another annoyance that I don’t understand. Most high quality phones today come with 3 Megapixel or better cameras. They also come with image stabilization and auto focus features that the iPhone lacks. But perhaps the biggest disappointment here is the lack of ability to take videos. I realize that there is software available that can rectify that if you are willing to “jailbreak” your phone. But why would I want to disable a feature of a phone that cost so much and take the chance of turning it into a brick?

So Apple, this is where you have missed the boat – big time – in my estimation.

And now on to what I like!

However, there is so much that you have done right that I have been willing to overlook the shortcomings. Here are just a few of what I think makes the phone so great:

Number 1 ““ It’s a great phone!

The sound quality is so much better than my old Windows SmartPhone that it is a joy to use it. Making a call is a breeze, just tap the Phone icon and you are presented with a number of choices from Favorites to Recent Calls, to Contacts to Keypad. Select one and go. The voicemail Feature does something that I always wanted my phone to do and that is to listen to the voicemail message that I want to hear without going through them sequentially. Apple calls it Visual Voicemail and it’s a gem.

Although I can’t listen to iTunes with my Bluetooth headset, the phone did recognize my Plantronics 510 headset and paired with it effortlessly. The iPhone also paired effortlessly with my wife’s Mercedes in-car phone system. Extra points for ease of use, but isn’t that what Apple’s all about?

Number 2 ““ The app store

I have downloaded over 55 applications from the store. Most of them were free. Using the apps I can post to my Blog using a free WordPress app that allows me to write a post, assign it to categories, assign tags and even add pictures to the post! That is called “WordPress for iPhone”. I found a free app called Simplify Media that allows me to stream my entire iTunes collection from my home computer to the iPhone. Since I have about 20 gigs of songs and podcasts, this is a great feature for my 16 Gig iPhone! There are a lot more, but you get the picture. The apps really extend the usefulness of the phone.

Number 3 ““ Exchange Server Connectivity

My day job requires that I be connected to the corporate email server. In fact, during the day, I live and die in Outlook except when I am on the road which is frequently. It was this requirement that kept me in the Windows SmartPhone world for so long as the iPhone’s first version could not attach itself to Exchange. Oh, you could get email from the Exchange server if your company allowed IMAP or POP3 connections. My company does not allow those connections citing security concerns. So, when the new iPhone came with Exchange support I was ecstatic and the implementation has been flawless. The installation only required my Domain name, my user name and my password. Once I accepted the certificate needed by our server (automatically discovered by the phone) I was up and running immediately. In fact, I was synchronizing my phone with our server before I even left the store; it’s just that easy to do.

My contacts and calendar are synced with the server and are available on the phone. If I make a change in either, it shows up in my desktop Outlook and vice-versa. And the email is truly “push” in fact, the phone chimes to announce the arrival of a new email even before Outlook knows that a new email has arrived!

Number 4 ““ I like the interface

The visual interface is a joy to use. Although it took some getting used to as my old Windows Mobile SmartPhone did not have a Touch Screen (It is a T-Mobile Dash). By the second day of using it I had become proficient enough with it that I was tempted to stop carrying the Dash. By the end of the first week the Dash had been retired. (Considering that I still have two moths to go on my T-Mobile contract, that statement pretty much sums up my experience with the iPhone”¦I just don’t want to put it down!)

I like the gestures: pinching to shrink a screen, placing two fingers together and then spreading them to expand a selection and of course the flick to move up and down a page. I have become very proficient with one finger typing, especially since I only use two fingers on a desktop keyboard!

Number 5 ““ Safari

It is so refreshing to have a browser like Safari on the phone! Web pages render just like web pages on a computer screen. Links on the pages work, the navigation of a page works just like on the desktop. My day job requires that I use Internet Explorer on the desktop because of the proprietary applications that rely on ActiveX controls, so the phone can’t help me there, but I have found alternative ways to work around most of those requirements.

So, the overall experience for me has been positive and I wholeheartedly tell anyone who asks to take the plunge and go get one. This is the closet device that I have found to having a fully featured computer in my pocket”¦without actually having one.

Leave a comment and let me know what you like and dislike about the iPhone. Who knows, maybe Apple will read them and make some changes in the next software release! Do you agree or disagree with what I have found with the phone?

The problem with that is when you are through with the page you have to close or minimze the browser and go back to your presentation. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to open a browser right in the slide and you didn’t have to leave your presentation?

As it turns out there is! LiveWeb will do just that and it comes in varieties that will work with every version of PowerPoint from PowerPoint 97 up to and including PowerPoint 2007. Oh and by the way, it’s also free! (It does require however that PowerPoint be on the presenting machine. The free PowerPoint viewer will not work).

You need to download and unzip a small file which contains a ‘ppa’ file (PowerPoint addin). Follow the easy to do directions and the addin is installed. One gotcha, though. Make sure that you disable macro security first or it won’t install. To do that, open PowerPoint, go to “Tools”, then “Options” and click on “Macro Security”. Then select “medium” or “Low”. Then finish the installation and you are good to go.

The way you use it is simple. Just start building your PowerPoint as you normally would do. When you get to where you want a web page, go to “Insert” and select “Web Page” from the drop down menu. An easy to follow wizard will take you through the process or you can do it manually. You can also decide whether you want the slide to be dynamic or static. In other words, each time you run the presentataion the addin can go and get the current web site or it can use the same static page.

When you are finished a new slide appears that you can modify or not. You may want to add a slide title, navigation buttons or other things that you might normally do. When you run the presentation and get to the slide you set up, a browser opens up right in the slide that displays the web site.

Here is how our favorite blog appears in a PowerPoint slide:

This has really helped my PowerPoint presentations move along quicker and I sure couldn’t complain about the price!

I am always on the lookout for cool PowerPoint freebies, so let me know what you have discovered…

There are several ways that I know of to do that. The first is to open up a program and seek out its color matching dialogue and apply what I call the “gosh, that looks close enough!” method to pick out a color. Another way is to copy the item that has the color I want by hitting “Print Screen” and then opening Paint, pasting in the item from the clip board, zooming in on it and then use the ‘Pick Color’ tool. At that point I can copy down the HEX code and I am good to go.

Obviously the first method is not very exact, and the second method requires a number of steps. If you need to do this a few times a day, one heck of a lot of time gets wasted!

So, to my great delight, Instant Eyedropper reduces all of that to one click, for free!

Once you install the free download, a new icon appears in the system tray that looks like this:

To use the tool you simply left click on the icon and then drag the mouse to the color that you want and voila! The hex code appears in the tool window. Release the mouse button and the code is now in your clipboard. Now you can return to your project and using the PhotoShop (or another graphics program) color picker tool, just drop in the code and you are done. You’ll have the exact color match.

A simple set of options is available if you right click the icon.

As you can see, you can choose from HTML, Hex, Delphi Hex, VB Hex, RGB and HSB formats.

I think that this is a really great time saver and you sure can’t beat the price!

Do you know of any other similar color tools?

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of RealtyTechBytes

Yahoo Real Estate puts a different spin on things. Remember that Realtor.com is Realtor® controlled and Craigslist is totally uncontrolled, except by the community and system moderators. Yahoo on the other hand, has entered into agreements with real estate brokers to display listings as well as into agreements with local MLS’s to display their listings. So you end up with a pretty good representation of what is available from real estate professionals.

Yahoo also shows you what’s for rent and what homes are in foreclosure, which is a nice feature (although you generally have to register with a third party to see the property details on the foreclosures)

Here is the home page of Yahoo Real Estate:

To illustrate how to use the site, we’ll take a trip to Beverly Hills, California 90210 to see if we can find any homes in foreclosure at a bargain price:

As you can see we found two for under a million dollars! Let’s select the top one and see what we can learn about the property.

Hmmm”¦we get some detail, but not much. If we want more we have to register with a third party. Notice the parts highlighted in green?

If we click on the ‘Neighborhood’ button on the left side we will get some info about the weather, the neighborhood, schools and more.

As you can see, we can find homes to buy using the free tools at Realtor.com, Craigslist and Yahoo Real Estate, but none of these sites really helps with analyzing whether a particular home is a good buy. This is where our next site comes into play.

Trulia is one of those new sites in the real estate space that fills a definite niche. They do so by providing a number of different analytical tools as well as enlisting the real estate professional to answer questions. This works a lot like Yahoo Questions in that you can ask real estate questions and get answers from a professional that you can use along with Trulia’s analytics.

Here is the Trulia home page that I have started at Beverly Hills 90210:

Right away you’ll get some stats and the ability to ask questions. But let’s follow the property we found at Yahoo and see what we can learn at Trulia.

Plus you have the comparisons with Yahoo Answers :

You will still have to register with a third party to get the details of the home such as its address, but Trulia starts to give more details on pricing as you can see from the graph. For even more analytics, just click on the “More Charts and Data” button :

That gives us a pretty good idea of what the values are and what the area is like, but there is one more place to check to be sure that we have a handle on the values before we call our agent to start the purchase ball rolling, and that would be Zillow.

Zillow uses public information from tax rolls as well as input from homeowners and real estate professionals to produce what they call a “zestimate” or their opinion of the property’s value. In many cases they are dead wrong, but in many other cases they are surprisingly accurate. Which you will experience is hard to say, but if they are significantly off of what you see on Trulia, then Zillow may be wrong. They are very accurate with tract homes that are similar to each other, but have the most difficulty with custom homes. That should not be held against them as even real estate professionals and appraisers find it hard to determine accurate values on custom homes.

Here is what you find at Zillow:

If you search for our Elderidge Drive example you get this:

Taking our 90210 example, you can see that they show every parcel on Elderidge Drive with a price. This is the “zestimate” that I mentioned. Since I don’t have the address of the Elderidge Drive house, (I didn’t want to register with RealtyTrac), I can’t be sure which parcel is the right one. But judging from the prices on that street, my guess is that this would be a good home to investigate. The homes are priced significantly higher that what is being asked by the bank to pay off the existing loan.

So, by using the free tools that are available, I can search for homes for sale, for rent and in foreclosure. I can compare neighborhoods, schools, amenities and I can see whether something is a good buy or not. All of this before I have to ever speak to a human being!

If you are even thinking about jumping into the US real estate market to take advantage of the incredible deals that are available, you’ll want to use the tools that we have talked about in this series of articles. You’ll be informed to make the decision that’s right for you and you’ll feel more comfortable with offers that you make.

If you have other free tools that you like, let us know about them in the comments!

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of Realty Tech Bytes

It’s hard to take some shots at Craigslist without running the risk of getting shot back at by the hardline Craigslist users, of which I am one as well. CL offers so many people a free way to advertise (or inexpensive depending on what you are advertising) that most of us are willing to overlook its flaws.

And if truth be told, the flaws are not so much with CL as they are with the advertisers. You see, CL is supposedly policed by the community with the moderators stepping in when enough community members “flag” a posting as being inappropriate. The problem with this method when dealing with real estate is that who knows enough about the property to be sure of what they are flagging? Is it the seller who in many cases may be desperate to attract any “buyer” with the hopes of sorting things out later? Is it the real estate agent who is often ignorant of online advertising guidelines? Or is it a “buyer” who spent time and gasoline to travel to a house that wasn’t what it was cracked up to be? Obviously, in these scenarios, there will be spotty enforcement of guidelines and your searching experience will reflect that fact.

Let’s take a look at the process and along the way I’ll give you some tips on how to safely navigate Craigslist real estate listings.

Here is the page you come to when you type in the Craigslist URL.

As you can see, CL is International in scope, and although there are some small regional differences, things work pretty much the same no matter which country or city you pick. So, pick your region and click on it. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so that is where I will start.

Notice the red circle. Under the major heading of housing, there are 9 sub headings from apartments to parking and storage. At the bottom you find real estate for sale. This is where we are going to look to start our search for the perfect home!

At arrow #1 you can see that it is possible to search the entire SF Bay Area, or search by the various regions within the Bay Area. It really helps to narrow your search down by using the region that you want to start with. At arrow number two you can see the considerable sized drop down list. Why Craig does this is beyond me. I can see just having the real estate categories there, but I guess Craig thinks that the users will change their mind and decide to look for a job while searching for real estate!

Here I have selected an area of the SF Bay Area known as the east bay (Arrow #1). Once I did that, the big drop down list (arrow #4) contains a list of the Bay Area cities. I wanted to look for homes where the seller was motivated (arrow #2) and all I want to spend is $500,000 to $575,000 USD (arrow #3)

This search (without actually selecting a city) found 12 listings. (Arrow #5)

Of those twelve, 7 are in one city, so we’ll concentrate on that city.

Now this is where we have to start to understand what is going on here. If you were to click on each of these listings you would find that there are three listings here by two local real estate agents. They have varying degrees of expertise in displaying the information on the houses. One uses Postlets (which I have previously written about here on Make Use Of) and the other uses his own template. Both are pretty effective in conveying the info you would want in order to decide to go see the house. Two of the ads are a ‘come on and get you give up your contact info’ to someone who claims to have a list of all the area foreclosures and the rest are being sold by the owners with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Here is one of the owner generated ads:

Not a lot to go on is there?

Here is a Postlets ad from a real estate agent.

As you can see, there is much more information available to you.

So, here is the wrap up. Craigslist is a grab bag of things. There is no consistency as to what you will find. You will find that some sellers advertise directly, but since most have never done it before, they don’t know enough to put lots of information in the ad. Even the real estate agents have no consistency in what they offer. And then there are the scammers who are trying to entice you to give up your contact info so that they can build a list of people to try to sell something to.

None of that sounds very good, so why use CL? In my opinion you should use CL as part of your search strategy for several reasons. One of the best reasons is because you can find things that are put on by the sellers themselves. There may be homes that are not on the MLS. In other words, you may find a lot of homes for sale by the owner.

But the most important reason, in my opinion, is the ability to search on words like “motivated” or “desperate” which can lead you to bargains that would be hard to spot otherwise.

You want to start your search on Realtor.com to get the big picture, and then you want to look at Craigslist to get some local information and to perhaps smoke out a bargain.

Next time we will look at Yahoo Real Estate to see how that search giant handles real estate search.

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of Realty Tech Bytes

But where do you start? The local newspaper? The homes for sale magazines in the supermarket? Do you drive around (at $4.55USD a gallon?) and look for signs?

No! You are a reader of MakeUseOf.com and you have a technology slant on the things that you do, so you want to use online tools to find that house. This is your lucky day because today I kick off a five part series on what I consider to be the 5 most significant online home search websites currently available in the United States.

I am a real estate broker, licensed in California, and I work in the San Francisco Bay Area, arguably one of the technology hot spots on the globe. People here EXPECT great tools to be available to them in every area of endeavor, and real estate is no exception.

The trouble is, how do you know which tool does what and which ones do it right? That’s what I hope to clear up for you with this series. We’ll start with Realtor.com, the granddaddy of them all. They claim to have most of the homes for sale listings, and they probably do, given their close association with the National Association of Realtors®. However, in my not so humble opinion, just having most of the listings does not make them the best choice for everything you need to know.

Let’s take a look:

This is the landing page of Realtor.com. Please notice the red circles, red arrows and numbers because I want to talk about each of those areas.

To start with number 1 and number 2, you can see a place to login. What a login? No way. Not a problem, you don’t have to login, the tools to search are free. But if you wanted to set up alerts to receive emails when a property similar to what you are searching for turns up, you’ll have to establish an account. The process isn’t all that hard though.

Next is number 3. Find Property Values. This is an Alpha of a new tool that Realtor.com is developing and as an Alpha, it’s not all together yet. It is worth looking at though because it allows you to search for homes using a map (although none of the three houses for sale on my street show up!). The really cool feature is that you can view a “heat” map that shows the range of prices across the US much like a weather map shows you temperatures.

This would be useful if you wanted to quickly gauge where you could buy a house for say $150,000. (not too many places).

Next we come to a blatant lie! Number 4 points to two areas where you are promised an “immediate” price quote on your own home if you had one to sell. The sad truth is that if you click on those links you are asked to give up some contact info, the address of your house and guess what’s next? A pop up window from a Realtor® who is local to your area and who has bid the most money for the privilege of having the chance to “snag” you as a customer. The “immediate” report is nowhere to be found because the local Realtor® has to generate it. It’s not an automated system and it exposes your contact info to the Realtor®. Don’t get me wrong, this is not necessarily bad, but at this stage of your search you don’t want to complicate things, so say no thanks to this tool!

Number 5 is almost as bad as number 4. This one is called Market Conditions. When you go to this page you get to tell it what area you are in and it purportedly takes you to the information on the local market that is provided by a local “expert”. Now, I can only speak for my area, but when I checked to see who the local experts were, I did not recognize any of them as being active in my area. They are apparently the highest bidders and the info they provide is generally available elsewhere. I didn’t see any real insight from any of them. Your mileage may vary, but how would you know?

By now you are probably thinking that there is no value in Realtor.com, but actually I have saved the best for last. The thing that Realtor.com really shines at is the search. Given that they have almost all of the available US listings and a lot of the Canadian inventory, this is the logical place to start a search for property. Here is the advanced search form from number 6:

And here is a sample results page:

I set the search parameters pretty tight to get these two results, basically I set the price range and beds and bath count to just get a few listings.

Notice that these listings have a gold border around the left side and the top. These are what is known as showcase listings. The listing agent has paid to have these listings enhanced with additional photos and property tours. The agent also gets some additional exposure as the next picture will show:

This is where Realtor.com shines. There are a number of photos, a featured tour of the home, great detail on the home itself and the ability to print a brochure and to also request a showing. The listing agent is also featured; in this case it is my beautiful wife!

So, even though I started out tearing Realtor.com apart, where it really shines is in the ability to search over 3 million active listings and present the data in a visually appealing format. This IS where you should start to develop your list of properties that are listed with a Realtor®.

There are better tools available for doing analysis, and we’ll look at them after we look at a few other search engines. Next time we’ll look at Craigslist!

In the meantime, why don’t you let me know what property search sites you like, and why?

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of Realty Tech Bytes

All of this is great, but how does the information get to these web sites? The sad truth is that for most of the listings, it’s done by an automatic feed from the local Multiple Listing Service. That feed often does not contain enough information for a prospective buyer to be able to truly understand what they are viewing. Of course, the real estate agent can often “enhance” the listing with additional pictures and more detailed information, but given the sheer volume of real estate web sites to enhance, the process is so time consuming that it simply does not get done all of the time.

Enter a cool web application called Postlets. Postlets is a FREE tool that allows a homeowner selling their own home, or a real estate agent with the listing, to create a free account. Then the user adds information about the property by clicking check boxes and filling in forms to create a very good looking “advertisement”.

The free version will also accept up to 6 JPG photos. There is the ability to “upgrade” to the “Plus” version which removes the ads that support the free version, add up to 18 photos, video and more for US$5.

Once you have created your Postlet, it is syndicated to over eleven real estate listing search sites including Zillow, Trulia and Google Base to name a few. The Postlet has a 60 day life and can be renewed if the listing doesn’t sell.

Finally, the site also creates the HTML that you will need to accomplish a Craigslist posting and will deliver you directly to the Craigslist website so that you can create an ad on Craigslist by pasting the HTML into the appropriate form.

Postlets are also available for those of you trying to sell a car.

Here is how to get started. Go to the signup page, fill in the form and click on Create Account.

After you have created your account you will be able to start your first Postlet by filling in the first of six screens.

The next screen allows you to start filling in information about the property. You can choose from residential, commercial, vacation properties and rental properties, as property types.

The third screen allows you to check off boxes to show all of the different property features, a quick and easy process.

The next screen is where you can upload up to 6 photos for the free version, and up to 18 photos with the “Plus” version.

No web publishing is ever complete until you get a chance to review your work. You can edit any of the entries that you have made and when you are happy with what you have, you can hit the “Continue” button at the bottom of the page to queue up the Postlet for submission to the various websites it serves.

Here is the fruit of our labors! This is an ad destined for Craigslist made with Postlets. The final screen gives you the code to embed in Craigslist (You have to do this yourself for Craigslist due to their terms of service) but the ad is automatically submitted to the sites that you choose.

The price is right (either free or no more than $5), the service is great, and the seller gets their home exposed professionally on many websites. If you are a real estate agent or home seller, what’s not to like? Plus if you are a home hunter, you will find that ads created by Postlets offer a lot more information to you than is usually available.

What websites and advertising services have you used in the past to sell your property? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Jerry Kidd is a California Real Estate Broker, blogger, educator and author of Realty Tech Bytes.