The National Association of Realtors just launched HouseLogic, a social and highly-engaging real estate site. Designed to help homeowners make smart decisions to maintain, protect and increase the value of their homes, we registered and set up our profile and found it to be easy to navigate, highly informative as well as entertaining. Clearly, it rivals Scripps’ DIY, and in some ways even takes on helpful sites such as Lowe’s and Home Depot.

In fact, if they haven’t thought of it already, this almost cries for a Lowe’s collaboration. The HouseLogic site was designed to follow people through the entire cycle of their homeownership, and has really, at first short glance, done a bang up job of pulling people in long term. In the last conversation we had with NAR they were still thinking about how to monetize. We’re thinking that a revenue share for Lowe’s or Home Depot products sold through the HouseLogic site or linked from there might well kickstart this revenue.

While an NAR spokesperson has just told us that such a collaboration is something they may think of for the future to “offset the costs” of the site, she also said that “right now the value of the site is in creating relationships with consumers and creating grass roots support for public policies.”

I registered for the site, and opted to let HouseLogic have the address of my new home. (Homeowners can keep this to themselves, if they wish.) The site recognized my house, and some features like square footage. I answered some questions – how long had I owned my home, how handy I was, how ambitious I am to complete my own DIY projects, and what I would like to learn about. Learning options included fixing home problems, finding better maintenance methods, increasing my home’s value, conserving energy, finding tax credits, improving my neighborhood (nice touch), making the most of my home finances, and lowering the cost of my home ownership. I checked everything – why not?

Then I found the badges – psychic rewards for completing DIY tasks, saving money, sharing my ideas and things I learned with my HouseLogic community, and so forth. In fact, once I completed my profile I had already earned two badges for doing so. I now have a binder to keep all my HouseLogic lessons and activities in one place, complete with deadlines and e-mail alerts as those deadlines approach. My binder landing page offers several lessons already – on the costs and benefits of professional energy audits, replacement of old windows, “green” remodeling of my bathroom, and conducting my own energy audit. For each I earn a badge just for reading it. For each there is a quiz as well.

Since I’m new to the neighborhood I really enjoyed looking at all the local community ideas available as a featured project on the How To page. Ideas included a neighborhood pot luck monthly or quarterly, and a guys or gals night out. There’s even an article about creating an online community of neighbors.

This is really the tip of the iceberg on this voluminously-informative site. I’ll be attending a HouseLogic online press conference soon, which will show me more about it. I’ll share with AIM Group clients what I learned.

Here’s the offical NAR press release of the launch.