It's the data, stupid.

As I said, I recently wrapped up reporting on an article that is now running in the Boston Sunday Globe. The piece started -- back in January -- as a look at Zillow's Make Me Move feature, which at that point had been out there for a few weeks and attracted a few hundred Boston area home owners. As I worked with my editor at the Globe on the story, however, the focus broadened to include Zillow's cousins -- Trulia, Redfin and especially a new site: Cyberhomes.com.

So what did I learn?

First of all, that data is truly the coin of the realm when it comes to Web-based real estate sites. Cool graphics and nifty map integrations are great, but these days Java and AJAX programming is a commodity. Cyberhomes CIO Marty Frame told me that his developers were able to build their site in around four months (which may explain the fact that the site didn't support Firefox in its first iteration). At the end of the day, visitors to your site are fickle and what's going to stick them to you is the depth and quality of the data you offer about their house, their neighbor's house, or the town where they live or want to live.

As my article makes clear, Zillow's Make Me Move is just a means to an end to get this kind of rich property data -- photos, improvements, additions, walk-through videos, whatever. The site that can aggregate that data and combine it in novel ways with the least effort and at the lowest cost is the site that will draw eyeballs -- nifty haircuts notwithstanding.

The second realization I had was that, at the end of the day, none of these Web sites -- Zillow, Cyberhomes, sitetobenamedlater.com can stand on their own for long. What are they, after all, but slick facades on the sausage factory that is the home selling and buying process in this country? Sure, we could dream that user friendly Web sites might some day disaggregate realtors from the home buying process, and turn the entire industry into a FSBO version of eBay, with informed buyers and sellers interacting on nearly level ground. Folks like Tom Russell, a wired and savvy homeowner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who I interviewed for the Globe, certainly imagined this kind of environment to be preferable to the old route of calling an agent and sticking a sign in your yard - -especially if, at the end of the day, you're holding on to an extra %3 to %5 in commission costs. The reality is that we're not anywhere near that place. Zillow netted 12,000 Make Me Move prices in the first month, then took another two plus months to double that figure. Hardly a run away success. To this day, Make me Move homes and home listings are still just 1/10 of one percent of the 70,000,000 homes Zillow claims to track, while Zillow is trumpeting zany haircuts as a recruiting tool -- which may be like the Silicon Valley equivalent of Jumping the Shark (shaving the shark, anyone?).

Three years from now, the vast majority of buyers and sellers will still look to traditional agents to find property and broker sales for them, even if they're using Web sites to narrow their options and direct their steps to open houses. This, of course, isn't news to executives at any of these startup firms. In just the last week we've seen Trulia come in from the rain by teaming up Realogy to offer home listings. And with something like $60 million in VC, but few ways to generate revenue beyond online advertising, it's hard to imagine many paths to profitability for Zillow's investors that don't involve some high-multiple hookup with a larger entity -- Google, which is already melding Google Base to real estate services, or Yahoo (desperate to get its mojo back) or Microsoft (sitting on a mound of cash and keen to be a spoiler to any deal with Google).

So what are these cool new sites good for? Lots of things, according to Marty Frame of Cyberhomes -- provided you've already got a lot of products lined up to sell through them. Frame, who spent years as CTO at Realtor.com before moving over to Fidelity National Information Services to be CIO of Cyberhomes, was one of the more astute observers of the Real Estate 2.0 scene that I spoke with. When I asked him the "Big Question" -- how do any of these sites make money? His response was as fast as it was eye opening: They don't, in and of themselves. As he explained it, Cyberhomes is a cool, free service that tells potential home buyers and sellers a lot about properties and the communities they're located in. It also tells its corporate masters, Fidelity Information Services, and Fidelity National Financial, an awful lot about people who may be interested in their products.

"Ultimately our goal is that, by being useful to consumers on an anonymous basis, we can provide access to products they're looking for at the lowest cost basis," Frame said. "We provide home ownership services that home owners need. (Cyberhomes) allows us to make ourselves useful in terms of the decision process owners are engaged in. Then, based on their use, we can work through our partners to make them an offer that's appropriate to what they're trying to encounter."

In the end, seeing a huge industry incumbent like Fidelity start to put the pieces together like that behind a slick front end like Cyberhomes.com can't be good news for Zillow and the countless startups that are jockeying to be the 800 lb. gorilla of the online real estate market. Because, basically, Fidelity already is an 800 lb. gorilla: sole owner of a massive database of property, appraisal and market data for nearly every property in the U.S., issuer of 1/3 of all title insurance policies, owner of extensive property analytics and automated property appraisal IP that is already in use by industry professionals.

In the next twelve months, big data aggregators like Fidelity will be taking the gloves off and tuning up (or buying up) some of the nascent sites we've all been writing about with new features that really go deep into that data. That'll be a good thing for consumers -- providing better access to more reliable data and more accurate appraisals and research tools. It probably won't be good thing for those investors who saw the makings of a real estate revolution in Web 2.0 startups like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin.