ReadWriteWeb

My wife and I thought that once we bought a house, our love of looking at homes for sale would be over. Turns out it's just plain fun to look inside, at the backyards, around the neighborhoods and at the prices of houses available for purchase. I enjoy it, at least, and if you do too - you should check out the free iPad app released by Realtor.com this week. (iTunes link) I think it's my favorite in the field. I wish we'd had it when we bought our house in Portland, Oregon.

Mint.com, the personal finance management system, already includes bank accounts, credit cards, student loans, car loans and more when providing you with a picture of your financial standing and today it will add one more to the list - your home valuation.

Mint has partnered up with Zillow to help determine home value and include this as part of the broader personal finance landscape.

As of today, Zillow's online real estate marketplace application is now available on phones running the Google Android mobile operating system. The new Android app is similar to the previously launched iPhone version but includes a couple of additional features like voice search and the incorporation of Google Street View images.

Yesterday, Google announced that it was expanding its real estate listings on Google Maps. In an interview with The Age, Andrew Foster, a Google product manager, explained that Google was rededicating itself to this market because it found that a growing number of people are using the Internet to search for a new home. Currently, according to data from Hitwise, Google Maps is only a very small player in the online real estate market and it only sends about 2% of its traffic to real estate web sites. The current market leaders are Realtor.com, Zillow, and Yahoo Real Estate.