Google Inc. may crush all other Internet search portals, yet when it comes to real estate listings, its often less of a destination than a pit stop. But will that change?

The Internet search behemoth drives a ton of Web traffic to real estate sites everyday. Still, Google hasn’t made a major play for domination in the online property search market, unlike sites such as Zillow.com, Trulia.com and Yahoo Real Estate.

So when Google makes a move in the real estate space, everyone watches for clues that might signal the sleeping giant is hungry for a bigger piece of the real estate pie. Such a move came about last week, when Google decided to spruce up its popular Google Maps page to highlight its real estate search tools and also began making searches for home listings available in Australia and New Zealand.

In the short term, the move will boost traffic to other real estate Web sites, figures Bill Tancer, general manager of research for Hitwise, an Internet tracking firm. But long-term, could be a different story.

“It’s a competitive threat,” Tancer suggests.

Established online listing hubs like Trulia and Zillow aren’t quaking in their boots, yet. And they don’t appear to have any reason to, according to Google spokeswoman Elaine Filadelfo.

“We’re certainly thinking about ways to improve the product,” Filadelfo says, “but it’s more about improving user experience, as opposed to how can we become the No. 1 real estate destination.”

For years, Google invited real estate professionals and others to submit their listings of homes for sale to the site via the Google Base portal-for free. It began letting users of its maps tool look up homes for sale about a year ago.

Still, the company didn’t trumpet its real estate functions on its sparse home page. You had to dig to get to Google’s property search functions, which are primarily tied to its maps tool. Even there, the option to search for real estate listings was hard to find.

If you typed in, say, “real estate Los Angeles,” Google displayed links to real estate firms and showed a city map splayed with dots where those businesses were located.

Cue Google’s redesign last week.

Now, a real estate query on Google Maps brings up a page with a link in the top left corner advertising real estate listings search. Or you can select the search options tab and click on a drop-down menu that includes a link to search for real estate listings.

An easier way to get there from the main Google page is to enter the search term “Google housing search.” That kicks back a link for Google Maps Real Estate at maps.google.com.

This page has a search box for looking up properties currently on the market by city, suburb or neighborhood within Google Maps. Like in many other real estate Web sites, users here can refine their searches according to certain criteria, including number of bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet and price range.

Type in Los Angeles, for example, and the site shows a map of the city nearly covered with red dots representing everything from homes for sale to homes that have received a foreclosure-related notice. Zoom in closer and a bubble pops up with a photos, price and links for other information, including the Web site that is hosting the listing. Users also can use Google’s Street View function to get a virtual on-the-ground peek at the neighborhood for any given property.

Since Google put in the changes, Google Maps has begun driving more traffic to real estate Web sites, Tancer says.

That’s still a far cry from Google’s main search site, which Hitwise says is the No. 1 source of traffic to real estate Web sites. Last week, users looking up real estate search terms on Google.com generated roughly 24 percent of all traffic to real estate sites, Tancer said.

Greg Sterling, an Internet analyst with Sterling Market Intelligence in San Francisco, says it would be tough for Google to compete with real estate-focused Web sites.

“That would be difficult for them to do, given that there are sites … that have much richer and very specialized experiences around real estate that Google isn’t going to compete with because they’re not going to devote the kind of resources (needed),” Sterling says.

Trulia and Zillow executives say they’re not losing sleep over the possibility, either.

“The real estate search and transaction process is very complex and very nuanced,” says Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia. “Google just doesn’t have the focus to be able to deliver an amazing experience on this.”

We’ll see.

Before we get into the graph, and what it may mean, we should have a little math tutorial. A math lesson is probably the best way to make most people stop reading this column and move on to their horoscope, or the funny pages, but hang with us for a bit. What this graph shows is the number of homes that go under contract (blue line) and the number that actually go to settlement (red line) on a 12 month rolling basis. Now for the math part. By 12 month rolling, we mean the total number for a specific 12 month period. This graph starts with the 12 months ending December ‘07, then the 12 months ending January ‘08, February ‘08 and so on. By using 12 month rolling, we eliminate any seasonality in home sales, and the graph more clearly shows you a general trend line.

So, what does the graph tell us? First, let’s look at the blue line, which is the number of homes under contract, or what is sometimes called pending sales. Pending sales are higher than homes sold (the red line), because not all homes that get a contract end up going to settlement. There can be a whole variety of reasons a contract may fall apart. For example, someone might not get their financing approved, or home inspection issues could cause it to unravel. Regardless, the pending home sales line appears to have turned the corner in March ‘09, and there’s continued growth through the end of last month. That’s encouraging, since an increase in pending sales can be a leading indicator, suggesting future growth in the number of homes sold.

Interestingly, the spread between pending home sales (blue line) and homes sold (red line) has remained fairly constant, until the economy blew up in September ‘08. At that time, the spread began to widen, and in the last three or four months, there has been an acceleration in the spread. This would indicate that more contracts are coming apart, before people can get to the settlement table. Our own anecdotal experience would confirm what the graph shows. In real estate agent terminology, a pending sale that doesn’t get to settlement is called a fall-thru.

Banks are constantly changing and generally increasing the requirements necessary to get a loan. Plus, these days there’s a greater chance that someone could lose their job. This, along with an overall heightened level of consumer stress, can contribute to the chances a contract will encounter problems and end up as a fall-thru. Additionally, the period of time between when you get a signed contract and when you actually go to settlement is longer than it used to be. When houses were selling like hotcakes, there might only have been a couple of weeks or a month at the most between a signed contract and settlement. Now, primarily because of the difficulty in getting financing approved, the time from contract to settlement could be a couple of months. For a short sale or a foreclosure, this time could easily expand to six months or more. As a result, the spread between pending sales and homes sold may continue to widen. And, there could also be more of a lag time between changes in pending sales and when we see them reflected in actual homes sold.

When you look at the red line (total number of homes sold), it’s been a long and steep downward slide. In 2007, there were a total of 6,182 homes sold in Anne Arundel County. For the 12-month period ending last month, there were only 4,181 homes sold – a decrease of over 32%. Nevertheless, there might finally be some good news in that red line. As of April 2009, it appears to have hit bottom. Unlike pending home sales, we haven’t yet seen it turn the corner and start going up. But if we can stop the bleeding, that will be the first step in curing the patient. As we said, pending home sales tend to be a leading indicator. Consequently, we would be surprised if that red line doesn’t begin to go up a bit over the next couple of months. The only fly in the ointment could be a continued problem with fall-thrus. Agents are out there showing houses and writing contracts, but if the credit markets don’t pony up the money, that red line could stay flat for a while. However, real estate agents are eternal optimists. We choose to believe that better times could be just down the road.

This week, we took a look at the number of homes being sold. Next week, we’ll examine housing prices -where they’ve been, where they might be going and how they relate to the laws of economics. When you have falling prices, it usually means that supply exceeds demand. That’s what we learned in Econ101. But, in this age of tremendous government intervention and control, the laws of economics don’t always apply. Next week, we’ll show you the numbers and take a stab at where it might all be going, with respect to prices.

Patterson, Barry Real Estate’s president and chief operating officer, will depart amid a profound slowdown in the real estate deals that marked much of his tenure with the company. However, he will remain on board through the end of the summer to help Barry Real Estate restructure debt and secure financing for new government projects.

“I feel like I can do something different,” Patterson said. “I’m going to stay in the real estate world. Atlanta is my home.”

The lousy economy continues to quash the commercial real estate market, driving down rents and pushing out tenants.

Nearly a third of office space is flat-out empty in parts of Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. A fifth of the offices are empty in the once-crowded Burbank Media District.

Viewed just months ago as far less responsive to the troubles that sank the housing market, commercial real estate is in such a profound slump that the sector’s woes could threaten a broader recovery.

“The statistics are alarming,” said Joe Vargas, senior managing director of real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. “And the turnaround could potentially be some time away.”

The sector is deeply connected to several troubled parts of the economy, including the frozen credit markets and the small retailer who can’t make his rent.

As a result, companies are moving out of buildings, not into them. Tenants who continue to rent are demanding — and getting — discounts.

Los Angeles County landlords are asking for an average of $3.08 per square foot per month for Class A buildings, down 5% from a year ago, according to Cushman & Wakefield, which tracks activity on a quarterly basis. In Orange County, rates plunged even more, with office building rents down 16%, to $2.61 per square foot.

Some upscale markets have seen even more dramatic drops.

“Tenants have the ability to trade up to better buildings,” said broker Bob Safai of Madison Partners.

In desirable Santa Monica, for instance, landlords eager to keep their buildings occupied have dropped their average asking price almost $1 a foot, to $4.74. Such reductions have spurred more lease deals lately, Safai said, but further landlord discounts are probably coming.

“The Westside still has some softening to do,” he said. “All markets do.”

Tenants can demand lower rents because landlords have so many empty spaces.

Overall office vacancy in Los Angeles County jumped to almost 16% in the second quarter, from 11% a year earlier, according to the Cushman & Wakefield report. In Westwood, a perennial favorite of Westside professionals, 18% of office space is vacant.

Vacancy at the John Wayne Airport area, home to many white-collar Orange County firms, reached 21%. Ontario, the heart of the Inland Empire office market, has 29% vacancy.

Part of the problem in Orange County and the Inland Empire is that developers built way too much office space during the boom, and now the market in those places is flooded. But even in downtown Los Angeles, where the last major office building was completed in 1992, vacancy rates rose to 16%, from 13% a year earlier. More than half a million square feet of office space has been vacated downtown this year.

The picture is also grim with regard to industrial space, including factories, workshops and warehouses.

Los Angeles County industrial vacancies averaged about 5% in the second quarter and could hit 10% by the end of this year, said Dwight Hotchkiss, another Cushman & Wakefield senior managing director.

The number of leases being signed has dropped as much as 50% from last year even though rents are down about 17%, he said. “Many companies have shut their doors.”

Vacancy is more than 20% in some parts of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where landlords provide large distribution centers for companies that bring goods through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Because of the slow economy, such imports have declined substantially for several months.

Experts do not expect the region’s market for office or industrial space to recover any time soon. Commercial real estate is a lagging indicator of the economy that will not come back until well after the job market does.

Safai of Madison Partners predicts that the real estate market will roar again, but maybe not for three more years. “Everyone thinks that the market will take five years to recover from a downturn,” he said. “We’re already two years in.”

As Canada’s 9.8 million Baby Boomers, who now range in age from 41 to 60, move through life, they’ll amplify the natural life-cycle maturity trend that carries individuals away from self-expression through ownership of material goods to an exploration of life through experiences. This aspect of maturity is one reason advertisers virtually ignore mature consumers. The movement away from materialism means less shopping as time goes on (even if that’s hard to visualize now), so why not get a financial jump on your future?

Spending less on things, most of them non-essential, is good news for land fill sites, the environment and especially dreams of property ownership. Direct more income to investment in real estate, and stop wasting it on impulse shopping and credit card interest, and your money will begin to work for you.

The 1995 release of the National Film Board film, Who’s Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics started Canadians thinking about the inaccuracies of economic measurement of many of the things that matter, much of it based on 18th and 19th century thinking, including the unpaid work of women and the environment. There’s a new book out now that picks up where Waring left off with suggestions for transforming money and economics into something we can live with.

“We think money is the root of all happiness, but it is empty, created out of emptiness and it is created out of debt,” said Alberta-based ecological economist Mark Anielski, author of The Economics of Happiness (New Society, 2007). He went on to explain that he was referring to our economy which is based on derivatives, not the making of anything, and on consistently transferring wealth from the poor to the rich, which continually consolidates wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

In The Economics of Happiness, Anielski explains that genuine wealth goes beyond how much money you have: “If true wealth represents all those conditions of life that contribute to our individual and community well-being, how do we decide what factors matter most? I would argue that our values, principles and beliefs define the conditions of well-being. What we value most about life defines our real wealth … . And if each of us can define real wealth personally, the term common wealth can then be defined as conditions of well-being of the commons or community, not only as concern for the common good. Measuring real wealth we should include not only monetary and worldly possessions but qualitative attributes like health (physical and mental), spiritual well-being, healthy relationships, love and respect, the condition of our physical living environment and the well-being of nature.”

Readers who want to understand the logic behind the economics of well-being will appreciate the detailed explanations that Anielski offers for his evolution from economist to ecological economist, and for his proof of the relevance of the economics of well-being.

Take the book’s Personal Genuine Wealth Survey and you’ll begin to see how everything from your upbringing and childhood experiences to relationships and leisure activities contribute to well-being and happiness and make your life worthwhile.

Dig into the origins of your personal value system and you may realize that levels of happiness are buried beneath layers of dissatisfaction bred by our advertising-driven society. What do you value? What are the essential elements of “home” to you? Our earlier column on clever use of interior space [ clever use of interior space ], proves that a home is what you make it. Is the size and decor of your home a true reflection of essentials for your well-being? What relationship between economics and happiness have you, consciously or unconsciously, chosen to live with?

Among projections of his genuine wealth economy, Anielski includes movement away from banks that charge interest: “I see cooperative member-owned banks and credit unions operating locally within a community and replacing the current large privately owned banks, whose directors and shareholders are absent. Ownership in these financial institutions would be widely held by citizens in a community in the form of a cooperative business enterprise.”

Anielski offers the strength of existing international cooperative organizations, including Canada’s Mountain Equipment Coop and Credit Unions, as proof of the viability of a genuine-wealth-based revision of community wealth distribution. Whether you agree with Anielski’s vision or not, this book could be a starting point for those who want to reevaluate their views on giving, receiving and happiness at this time of year and into 2008.

I wish you all genuine happiness over the holiday season, in 2008 and beyond.

Hence, title insurance does not guarantee the state of title, but is a contract by the insurer to indemnify the insured to the limits of the amount of the policy if a claim is made against the title to the real property.

Title insurance provides coverage against matters existing as of the effective date of the title policy and does not cover defects in title arising for the first time after the effective date.

Title insurance companies (“title companies”) issue title policies and title insurance agents (“title agents”) are authorized to issue title policies for certain title companies. Title companies issue, underwrite and guarantee title policies, whereas title agents write title policies on behalf of a title company and receive a portion of the title insurance premium in return. The title company, as opposed to the title agent, is the party that pays on any successful claims made against the title policy.

Once a title company or title agent is selected, a request for title insurance (along with a legal description of the real property) will be submitted. A title examination is made to determine the condition of the title to be insured and to evaluate the risk to be undertaken in the issuance of a title policy. Subsequently, a title commitment will be issued which commits the insurer to issue a title policy in favor of a named insured in the amount of the purchase price of the real property.

Title commitments set forth exceptions to the coverage of the title policy. Examples of exceptions to coverage may include easements of record, outstanding mineral interests, or liens against the real property. It is in the insured’s best interest to have as many exceptions removed from the title commitment as possible. Unless removed from the title commitment, exceptions will be set forth in the title policy, and the title company will not be responsible for any claims arising out of such exceptions. The title commitment also sets forth the conditions that must be satisfied before the title policy will be issued.

At the closing of the transaction, the title agent, on behalf of the title company, will issue a title policy (or a marked up title commitment) after all required documents have been executed and delivered and the funds to purchase the real property have been transferred from the buyer to the seller. The title policy will be effective as of the date of the closing.

The two most common types of title policies issued are the owner’s policy and the mortgagee’s policy. The owner’s policy insures the buyer/owner of real property against loss or damage as set forth in the title policy. The mortgagee’s policy insures against the same types of risks as the owner’s policy, is issued in favor of the buyer’s lender, and is generally issued at the request of the buyer to satisfy the buyer’s lender. Texas uses standardized forms and rates for title insurance.

Although the party that pays for the title policy is typically the seller, both the seller and buyer are free to negotiate in their earnest money contract which party will be responsible for payment. The premium for title insurance is paid at closing and a settlement statement reflecting such payment will be issued by the title company.

After months of delay, the chairman of the Senate banking committee last week unveiled his major reform plans for the home mortgage industry — and they’ve got some real teeth.

Among other provisions, Dodd’s bill would ban all prepayment penalties imposed by lenders in connection with subprime and nontraditional loans, require escrows for taxes and insurance for all subprime borrowers, and prohibit loan officers from steering home buyers to higher-rate, higher-fee mortgages than they deserve or can afford.

Violators would get hit with mandatory cancellations of the loan — full paybacks of downpayments, principal, interest and closing costs fees — and $5,000 cash penalties on top of that.

Inflated appraisals would also be targeted: Borrowers could sue their bank or loan broker any time the appraisal on a house came in 10 percent or more below the actual market value, as established by independent valuations.

And all those “liar loans” — you know, the ones requiring no asset verification, no income verification, no verification of employment that were so popular at the height of the housing boom — well, you can probably kiss them good bye if Dodd’s legislation is enacted.

The bill would impose much stricter requirements for documentation … and would give the Federal Reserve Board the authority to write regulations enforcing the tougher standards.

Dodd is expected to push his reform bill for Senate floor action as quickly as possible, and then go to conference with the House, which has already passed a comprehensive mortgage market reform bill with roughly similar objectives.

With the chairman back in the legislative saddle, there’s also a better chance for Senate floor action on the bill the housing market has been waiting for months to see: Reform of the Federal Housing Administration’s loan programs — higher mortgage limits, lower downpayments and risk based pricing to pull in a wider span of home buyers and refinancers.

We’ll keep you posted.