For many home buyers, a remodeled kitchen or a big back yard are irrelevant to the house hunt -- they care most about the neighborhood schools. Now those buyers can search online for homes in a specific school district.

That new feature at Trulia.com is an example of the latest passel of real estate innovations to hit the Internet this week. Sites are competing to deliver the newest, most complete, most consumer-friendly services to would-be home buyers and sellers in the hopes of wooing both consumers and advertisers.

"Search by school district, unsurprisingly, was the No. 1 request" from Trulia users who gave early feedback to the year-old San Francisco real estate search engine, said Trulia co-founder and Chief Executive Pete Flint. The feature covers 12 states, including California, Arizona and Nevada. "School district and nearby schools are one of the key reasons people choose neighborhoods," Flint said.

Other new real estate features that appeared this week:

• AOL launched a site featuring articles for first-time buyers, sellers, vacation home buyers, investors and renters.
• ZipRealty began allowing sellers who are not using real estate agents to post their listings on the Zip site for free. If a Zip agent finds a buyer, the seller pays out a 2.5 percent commission to Zip. The for-sale-by-owner listings are not directly searchable by registered Zip users, but are e-mailed to buyers who say they're interested in similar homes.

"We're starting to hear more and more consumers saying, 'I want to sell it myself because I don't have as much equity,' " as before the market slowed, said Pat Lashinsky, ZipRealty's senior vice president for product strategy. "The biggest issue FSBOs have is trying to find buyers... we have literally hundreds of thousands of buyers on our platform."

Also this week, Zip began allowing users to post "reviews" of homes or neighborhoods.

• At Reply, a site devoted to matching real estate agents with buyers and sellers, visitors soon will have access to aerial photos, parcel maps and sales history for about 70 million properties nationwide, plus automated property valuations, comparable sales data and market trend information.

Gathering and integrating so much data "is extremely expensive," said Payam Zamani, chief executive of Walnut Creek-based Reply, which also provides information on automobiles. "As a result a few large players are going to enter the race."

• Seattle-based Zillow and HomePages provide similar information.

About $2 billion will be spent this year on online real estate ads, according to a report from Borrell Associates, a research and consulting firm that specializes in interactive advertising online. Borrell expects that amount will grow to $3 billion by 2010, surpassing spending for real estate ads in newspapers. Real estate and technology companies are chasing those dollars in part by offering ever-more creative consumer tools on their sites.

Still a few flaws

Certainly, there are plenty of flaws in the online home search experience, even with the new energy and venture capital pouring into the sector.

Take AOL's first-time home buyer channel, which aims to equip buyers with the most basic of information before they begin their search. Its glossary lacks a definition of "title insurance," but includes one for 'turtling," which it defines as "An overwhelming urge to pull your shirt up over your head and hide from the world as you try to grasp all the real estate industry jargon."

And though Trulia allows you to search by school district, home buyers will want to do some of their own homework first, as there's no list of the best performing schools in a given area, or a way to compare scores for two districts side by side.

Also, while the aerial map of listed homes is fast becoming a standard feature on many home-search sites, they are sometimes inconsistent. On a recent trip to Yahoo Real Estate, for example, a request to see a map of homes in San Jose's 95125 ZIP code yielded a map of the western half of the United States, with a tiny icon of a house floating over San Jose. On the next visit, the map worked just fine.

Still, with the amount of real estate data crowding onto the Web these days, by year's end consumers may be able to search for homes based on paint color.

Flint, the Trulia executive, said Google Earth-inspired mapping and high-speed Internet connections are driving the new wave of innovation in real estate. Meanwhile, online real estate business models are evolving as companies learn they can make more money by selling advertising than by trying to wrest commission dollars from traditional real estate brokerages.

Finally, he said, more consumers are going online for help interpreting the slowing real estate market.

"Consumers are desperate for numbers; they're desperate for data," he said.