Two New Real Estate Sites

I'm going to link to an article from the New York Times Business section regarding a couple of new Web sites in the general real estate sales market. Quoting the article:

One site, Zillow.com, which will be introduced today, will help consumers obtain more accurate real estate sales information — to the consternation of some real estate agents.

A smaller site, Redfin.com, introduced an unusual new service last week that might be even more disruptive to the real estate industry: the feature automates the process of bidding on a house online.

Some additional competitors in the real estate arena, although at first read it doesn't appear that Zillow provides any brokerage services.

It will be interesting to see how things shake-out over the coming months and years. Can real property transactions become nearly totally Internet based or might the huge sums of money involved require more personalized service? Obviously as a lawyer we're still bound by the Statute of Frauds and there must be written contracts.