URBALO

Hotpads.com is back with a slightly different design. The site has not changed all that much and the interface is still a little too cartoony for my tastes. The icons, while visually interesting, consume way too much screen real estate on a map search and make the search experience a little clumsy in my opinion.
Here’s a full list of the new features from their press release:

* New HotPads Maps
* Microsoft Satellite Mapping Integration
* Neighborhood and City Demographic and Housing Stats with Wikipedia
* Articles
* Political Party Affiliation Mapping
* Demographic and Housing Heat Maps
* Points of Interest Mapping including Schools, Universities and Public
* Transportation

What is most interesting to me out of this list are the heat maps, which you can now layer over a search and show datasets like population density, per capita income and median rent.

Drilling down to a particular apartment takes you to an expanded property view which gives you a couple of slick features; a dynamic slide show of photos (should any exist) and the ability to tag the listing to del.icio.us and even share it on Facebook - a feature I’m think more of the real estate search engines should adopt.