There’s always something to howl about.

Social bookmarking for home search. Will it work?

This has been in draft mode for a few days now since I commented on this at Mashable. That’s just as well since Benn over at AG was able to get a look under the hood which changes my feelings about this new bookmarking app for home lookers. (now in beta testing)

I’ve been a big fan of using Delicious for my own personal research for a while now. It offers a simple way to tag, take notes, and store in the cloud what it is I need to understand about something I’m curious about so that down the road I can either share that information with others or keep it private to myself.

Dwellicious puts forth the effort to do this for home search. As some of you may remember, this has been tried before with little success (if at all) for some reason. My take at first blush is that it’s something that users will be hard pressed to adopt. I have worked with several tech savvy clients who have done their own home search with the tools to share information and what I have found is that they are very reluctant to share anything about their decision making process. People hold their cards close to their chest when purchasing homes and often don’t even know what it is they want until they see it. So, for note taking purposes, I don’t know that it will be much help, but it’s nice to have the option.

It’s too bad you don’t see a consumer based search site that has all of the inventory data with a few solid consumer centric options like saving, RSS updates, and sharing without all the advertising, hierarchy of ‘featured listings’ and sponsorship options getting in your way. Bookmarking while weeding through various sites seems to be a chore few will have the know how or patience to handle. Another problem might be the slowness of updating on these sites to make any timely use of RSS. It could be a rewarding experience for those to venture another step into being their own agent, yet there are still a few bricks in that wall, that are still in place.

One step closer to better is what this should be as the robust portion of the pie seems to be where you’ll find at least 8 API’s built in help aggregate a variety of related information from sites like Zillow, Walkscore, Cyberhomes and Panaramio. Now that’s something the advanced home searcher can sink their teeth into. On the other side it would be cool if there were a Kayak type of search engine to pull in all the listing data to pluck from, but then again Real Estate technology is nothing like Travel, now is it?

Watch and see.