Zoocasa.com, a real estate website featuring homes for sale across Canada and funded by a subsidiary of Rogers Communications, will be "the Realtors' best friend," promises the company's head of magic, Saul Colt. Yes, that's really his title.

"We are fun and different" than other property listing sites on the Internet, Colt says. The site, which has been operating in beta mode for several months, made its launch official recently at the Rogers Centre, producing a gag listing for the stadium as a way to show off the site's features.

"There are lots of sites that let you see listings, but Zoocasa.com lets you find the home you want by searching for what is important to you – things like neighbourhoods and schools," says Colt.

"It's more intuitive than the other sites," he says. When a user clicks on a neighbourhood that interests them, they can view the location of nearby schools, restaurants, parks and hospitals. The school information indicates which schools are in the 'catchment' area, as well as the number of students in the school, and how it ranks in standardized testing.

Another feature calculates the "walk score" of the neighbourhood on a scale of one to 100. That shows how close the property is to stores, restaurants, libraries, parks and other facilities.

Zoocasa.com also offers email alerts to notify users if a listing price changes, or for new listings that match the potential buyer's wish list. There's also an iPhone application that provides updates via Twitter.

A competitor to Zoocasa.com in the Southern Ontario market is HomeFinder.ca, which is owned by a subsidiary of Torstar, the Toronto Star's parent. Homefinder.ca also prides itself on its intuitive features, including a broad range of demographic information about neighbourhoods. If you're thinking of moving to a neighbourhood, you can see if you'll fit in by viewing the average age of local residents, how often they move, their average income, how much they give to charity, and even what types of music they like and what magazines they buy.

Nationally, the king of the property websites is Realtor.ca, which is owned and operated by the Canadian Real Estate Association. It has the most listings because of its national membership. Ken MacKenzie, who recently retired as executive officer of the Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, was involved in launching and upgrading the site for several years.

"The benefit of Realtor.ca is the quantity of data it contains," he recently told REM. "Virtually all MLS listings in the country are there and the quality is there too – these are all active listings. On other systems you can see listings up there for years after they've expired or been sold. The numbers – three million unique visitors a month – are holding. That's a very impressive number, in a country with 30 million people."

Zoocasa.com stresses in a news release that it "works in tandem with the real estate industry in Canada, providing Canadians with easy access to full real estate listings from the original source, connecting buyers and agents faster." Zoocasa.com general manager Butch Langlois says the site is an aggregator of property listings from public sites, partnerships with other companies and direct "grass roots" contact with real estate agents and brokers, who are encouraged to place their listings on the site free. He says the company is also approaching real estate boards across the country to make a deal for their listings.

He says for-sale-by-owner listings will not be allowed on the site. Some new home builders may be allowed to place listings on Zoocasa.com, but that will be determined on a case-by-case basis, Langlois says.

It's a different approach than that taken by an affiliate of Bell Canada, Rogers' arch-rival, when it launched a property listings site in 2006. That company teamed with a discount real estate broker, aiming to show listings and offer consumers lower commissions than traditional real estate brokerages. The broker gave the company access to the Toronto Real Estate Board's Multiple Listing Service, but the board cut off the broker's access, saying that providing the information to a third party was a violation of board rules. That resulted in litigation that is still ongoing. However, the Bell Canada affiliate sold the website name and is not involved in the lawsuit.

With its Realtor-friendly approach, Zoocasa.com says it has more than 100,000 listings across the country so far, and Colt says it will have "the biggest concentration of listings outside the MLS in Canada."

He says, "We are not selling homes, we're in the information business. The Realtor is the person who facilitates the transaction."