• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 4, 2009

FrontDoor.com, a real estate portal powered by Gabriels Technology and owned by HGTV, has signed a deal to share real estate listings with 250 newspaper Web sites, including properties belonging to Cox Newspapers, Freedom Newspapers, Journal Register Co. and Southern Newspaper Group.

FrontDoor.com is also sharing listings with some big national newspapers, including The Boston Globe, owned by The New York Times Co., Atlanta Journal-Constitution, owned by Cox Enterprises, Minneapolis Star Tribune and The Denver Post, owned by MediaNews. The deal will make FrontDoor's 4 million national real estate listings available to visitors to these newspaper Web sites, complementing their own local real estate listings.

The first phase of the partnerships, introducing interactive real estate listings with search and browsing functions, will eventually be followed by the introduction of more multimedia content, including articles and videos from real estate experts.

This may include repurposed or custom-created content from HGTV, a Scripps Networks property which has used its cable shows to promote the site and vice versa. FrontDoor already has similar deals to provide real estate listings to 60 local TV station affiliate Web sites, including WSB-TV in Atlanta and KMGH in Denver.

After leading the economy into recession, any recovery in the housing market is still tentative. Housing prices remain low, with the median new home price down 12% in June compared to the same month last year; however, real estate brokers are hopeful that low prices will eventually translate into higher sales.

Prices have been driven down, in part, by a record number of foreclosures in the first half of the year, with approximately 325,000 in June alone, according to RealtyTrac -- an increase of 34% over the same month in 2008.