The Web just keeps coming up with new ways to help make buying or selling a house easier. But the focus has gone from information to conversation; many sites are designed to enable users to freely exchange knowledge and opinions about places to live and homes for sale.

Getting answers - Zillow

About 80 percent of all home buyers begin their quest online, according to the National Association of Realtors. Usually, they visit sites such as Realtor.com, which contain most of the listings available within a specified area.

Those sites, however, usually answer only a few of the myriad questions that prospective buyers have about houses. They often don't address subjects like: How is the neighborhood? Is it on a busy street? Is there any nearby place for the kids to play? Zillow is attempting to expand the conversations centered around the home listings by providing an online forum for exchanging that kind of information.

The Home Q&A feature enables any user to ask a question about a property and expect an answer. Since its April 4 launch, the site has already fielded 2,000 queries, 700 of which have been answered, according to spokeswoman Amy Bohutinsky.

"People are jumping in and using the feature," she says. "A lot of agents are answering the questions."

Questions run the gamut from "How much are the sewer taxes" to "Is there frequent crime in the area" to "Who plows the dirt road."

Zillow hopes that the information exchanged will enable house hunters to narrow down their list of houses to physically examine without leaving their computer.

Information exchange - StreetAdvisor

StreetAdvisor.com enables user to both read and write reviews and comments about the street where they live.

Streets are rated in five categories: Vibe, which is based on neighborhood spirit, nightlife and such; Wired, based on such criteria as access to cell service and cable; Health (traffic and noise); Value (cost of living and home resale); and Essentials (schools, medical care and public transportation).

But contributors can add any other information or opinion they want.

"Comments are the biggest aspect of it," says company spokesman, Brian Solis. "You can talk about people parking in front of your house, whether cars speed down your block, anything. If you're thinking of moving into a neighborhood, it's a way of finding out what's happening at the street level."

StreetAdvisor.com is still in a testing phase but already has thousands of street reviews. Solis estimates that within 90 days or so, the site will have reached a critical mass and morph into a full 2.0 stage. At that point, there should be hundreds of thousands of streets that have been reviewed.

It promises to be a handy reference for anyone considering a move into the neighborhood.

Free MLS listing - Iggys House

Iggys House offers a valuable service for owners who want to sell their homes themselves: free access to the multiple listing service (MLS). The MLS is a database of information about on-the-market homes that real estate brokers share. Real estate agents use the MLS to connect buyers with sellers.

Today some 70 percent of all houses are sold through the MLS. In the past few years discount real estate brokers started selling access to MLSs for a flat fee starting at around $300.

According to Joe Fox, founder of Iggys House, some 1.2 million people went the for-sale-by-owner route in 2006. About 800,000 of them were successful. "The new service is a no-brainer for people like that," he says. "It will open you up to more exposure."

He adds that clients have trouble accepting that this Iggy's is a free service. "People love free," he says, "but they keep asking about the catch. There is no catch."

Sellers are free to load up their listings with as much description, data, and photos of the property as they care too, including video tours.

Fox hopes, but does not require, that clients who use the free service will migrate to his other site, BuySide Realty, which acts like a traditional real estate broker except that it rebates 75 percent of its commissions back to buyers at closing.

Accurate estimates - Zaio

At one time, an appraisal meant that an experienced evaluator would make a physical inspection of the home and compare it to other recently sold homes in the area.

But several years ago, a cheaper method of appraising, a computer generated automated valuation model (AVM), came into use. Since this technique lacks specific information on the condition of a home, it can produce a very inaccurate appraissal.

Zaio is a new company that works with appraisal firms all over the country that employ physical inspections for all the properties they evaluate. This should produce accurate appraisals that will be regularly updated as home prices change. The appraisal will be available, for a fee, to consumers online.

The service has launched in just two communities so far, Spokane, Washington and Mesa, Arizona, but Thomas Inserra, Zaio's founder, says he expects to have values for 70 million properties with the next 18 months.

The price of the service will run between $200 and $300 and the site will feature photos and information on each of the homes.