I couldn’t help but notice that ‘Future’ featured an upgraded Frontdoor.com BETA on their site. I wanted to take this portal for a spin to see how it measures up as a potential marketing vehicle for Realtors and brokerages alike. So I put together a quick list of the ten things I dig and don’t dig about it… Five things I LOVE about Frontdoor.com: 1. When searching for properties, the Google Map it pulls up goes across more than 3/4 of the screen, making it very easy to space out all the tabs to the properties on the map. It also allows you to quickly collapse the map entirely. 2. The neighborhoods grouped to the side of the Google Map actually make pretty good sense. I’m not sure where they pull the geo information from to populate it, but the fact that it knew that there was a "North of Montana" neighborhood in Santa Monica was impressive. 3. Breaks down the monthly payment on a property within a set of specified terms. It’s nice to know (even if only roughly) if a home is within your price range right off the bat. 4. The site gives a concise breakdown of lifestyle metrics like community demographics, education level, property taxes, crime rate, and commute time. You can view these stats based on the zip code, the city, and the state. 5. All the Top Ten lists that they have! Each of these articles contain ten items that you can then drill down into for even more detail on each subject. 6. I know I said five things…. but they also have a Wiki of sorts where they link the answers to various questions to the appropriate documents on the site. And it’s pretty cool! Five things I HATE about it (or at least strongly dislike): 1. Expanding the Google Map after collapsing it caused an error where it showed two of the same Flash ad and a lengthy delay in the map reappearing. This was on Firefox. 2. When opening the mortgage calculator, the "Hot Properties" on the side were not from the area that I searched for properties in. It’s not like I’m going to change my mind about living in sunny California and want to move to New Jersey by seeing a featured placement ad… relevance, anyone? 3. This is being picky, but if I had no idea what the Relative Crime Index score meant, it would be nice to know if the score of the area I was considering living in was better or worse than the national average. It only gives the average, not whether higher or lower is better. 4. The videos section doesn’t have any way to browse through them, you have to watch TV commercials, and most of the vids have no still frame preview so you can’t tell them apart with the generic "Cool Houses Daily" splash page. 5. Ok, the last thing I hate is actually another thing I like about this website; that the Google Map updates with new properties that fit your search criteria as you grab and drag it. In the end, my first impression of this site is that it’s a clean looking, fast-loading real estate portal that has a ton of original content and some great Google Maps integration. Their property video section could use some serious work, and I think there are probably more than just a handful of ‘common sense’ kind of tweaks that still need to be made. But it’s a solid effort, and Frontdoor.com is definitely a site you should upload your XML feed to because they let agents list their properties on it at no cost.