New companies and new technologies are continuously breaking ground in the housing sector. Even "old" real estate science is getting better and better.

Here's a look, in no particular order, at some of the fresh and promising tech ideas that have entered the space recently, or are about to.

-- BoostUp. This free social savings platform helps people save for a downpayment by offering a dollar-for-dollar match on their savings from brand-name partners such as Quicken Loans, as well as from family and friends. Hence the name "Boost."

Savers create an account, set a goal and automate deposits to reach that goal through responsible savings.

-- HomeTrackr. Some 40 percent of all houses have serious issues. This free service aims to tell would-be buyers about them.

While there is loads of information available about houses, it is largely scattered about and driven by advertising dollars through listing sites. This site, which hopes to become the "Voice of the Home Buyer," provides critical, property-specific data that can make or break a sale -- but only if the buyer knows about it.

-- Solo. Want to go it alone, but need some help? This community platform will connect you to agents who offer specific unbundled services -- writing up a contract, for example, or building a comparative market analysis -- for a small fee.

Most buyers use all the services agents have to offer, or none at all. But one size does not fit all. Agents aligned with this site offer their services on an a la carte basis, so you can customize the level of services you need. And you save up to half the commission in the process.

-- Sindeo. Claiming that the mortgage marketplace is broken, antiquated and inefficient, this service has a lofty goal: to become the trusted place where buyers can plan, shop, qualify for and close their loans, and receive expert, unbiased service along the way.

This site takes buyers through a four-step process, including helping you come up with a personal plan to afford your first or next house, and guiding you every step of the way until the loan is funded. Rookies will learn about first-time buyer programs such as downpayment assistance, and receive a personalized action plan to improve their eligibility for financing.

-- Homes. A long-running online search destination with some 3 million property listings, this site has added a "School Search" feature that allows purchasers to make more informed decisions by determining the caliber of schools in their search area.

The technology is calculated from state test data for public schools and assigns a letter grade, from A+ to D, based on their performance.

To determine the ranking, state test scores from one school are compared to those of other schools in the same state with the same education level.

-- Automatic. This $100 accessory plugs into any automobile made after 1996 and allows you to sync it to your iPhone or Android device. It then becomes an app store for your car, offering 20 functions so far, including home automation.

It will link to your Nest app, for example, so that when you turn on your car when you leave work, it will tell your house to be at the right temperature when you arrive 30 minutes later. Or warn you that you forgot to close the garage door when you headed out for the day.

Futuristic stuff.

-- EMTransfer. Set to launch this month, this site intends to facilitate the electronic collection and deposit of your earnest money, and track it online so you will know that your agent or builder isn't dipping into the cookie jar illegally.

-- ReaLync. This is a web/mobile platform that facilitates virtual tours and pre-recorded videos so you can see and hear about specific houses at your leisure, at any time and from anywhere.

At this site, you can interact live, capture photos, view local details and send messages. Better yet, all tours are automatically saved in the cloud so you can watch them again and again and share them with friends and family.

If that real estate agent you're considering listing your house with brags about having dozens of listings from other clients, you may want to consider someone else.

Agents who are "working" more than, say, six listings at one time are not as productive as those who have less than a half-dozen in their back pockets, according to new research.

"Greater agent inventory is associated with a slightly lower price and a significantly higher time on (the) market," according to the study by three faculty members at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia, who were joined in the research by a colleague at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.

Agents tend to prefer having a lot of listings: The more listings, the greater the probability of nabbing a commission. Their brokers, the guys who pay agents their share of the deal, like them, too: Not only does it make the company appear larger and more successful, it also means the broker will earn a fee even if the house is sold by an agent from another firm.

Indeed, brokers like listings so much that they encourage their agents to secure a seller's name on the dotted line by offering higher commission splits to the company's largest listers.

But the recent study published in the Journal of Housing Economics -- "How Many Listings Are Too Many?" by Xun Bian, Bennie Waller and Scott Wentland of Longwood and Geoffrey Turnbull of UCF -- found that additional listings place greater claims on an agent's time and energy. That, in turn, has "adverse sales performance consequences" for the client.

Most sellers want to sell at the highest possible price and as quickly as they can. But if you're just one of your agent's many sellers, you're all competing not only for buyers, but also for your agent's time and effort. And all of you are likely to become disenchanted if your expectations are not met.

One reason for sellers' disappointment is that most people neither understand nor appreciate the logistics required in selling a property, from the time a house is listed all the way through closing. That's understandable. After all, how many times in your life do you sell a house?

But sellers also fail to realize that the burden placed on agents to do their jobs increases exponentially with each additional listing.

Previous research has also found that more listings dilute agents' efforts and increase their focus on higher-priced properties. But the Longwood/UCF study goes further by actually putting the situation into numbers consumers can easily understand.

To do that, the researchers studied more than 21,000 properties listed on an unspecified Virginia multiple listing service that were sold during a 10-year period (from April 1999 to June 2009). The typical house in the sample -- 26 years old with three bedrooms and two baths -- was listed at $173,600 and was sold for $168,100. It was on the market for an average of 111 days.

Here's what the four researchers found: When an agent had nine listings, the average sales price for his or her "inventory" was only slightly below the baseline average -- not even 1 percent -- and marketing time was nearly 14 percent longer.

That works out to a $1,000 lower selling price and an extra 15 days on the market. Not terrible.

But when the listing agent represents a "very high" number of sellers -- 15 or more -- his or her typical selling price is 3 percent less and the property remains on the market for 129 percent longer than the average.

Numerically, that's more than $5,000 less than agents with more modest inventories get for their buyers. And it takes 142 days -- a month longer -- to find a buyer as opposed to 111 days for the average listing in the study.

That's significant, the study says: "While the impact on price is modest, the effect of agent inventory on liquidity is substantial." And it's true even though agents with a high number of listings represented just 10 percent of the sample.

The conclusion: "There is a relationship between agent inventory and (the) sales outcomes that sellers care most about -- selling price and time-on-market."

"The results are striking," the study continues. "Agents representing 15 or more listings may be trying to represent too many clients at one time, resulting in a substantially larger marketing duration and an important source of illiquidity for numerous homes in this market. ...

"Greater inventory diverts selling effort. ... resulting in longer time-on-market for all houses in the inventory."

Financing has never been easy for mom-and-pop landlords who want to invest in rental houses. But the market is starting to open up.

In the past, small-time investors often out-and-out lied to would-be lenders that the houses they were buying would be their personal residences. Their only other options were to eliminate the need for funding altogether, by emptying their bank accounts and paying cash, or by finding so-called "hard money" lenders whose terms are often rather stiff.

Sometimes, conventional lenders knowingly "winked" at borrowers who weren't really planning to live in the houses they wished to finance. But even then, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- the two major mortgage investors that buy loans from primary lenders -- placed severe restrictions on the number of rental properties individuals can finance.

Fannie Mae won't buy more than four loans made to a single investor, for example, and Freddie Mac limits the number to 10. Even at that, though, the two government-sponsored enterprises' lending guidelines are tighter than Bryce Harper's home run swing.

To fill that void, several big private equity firms, including the Blackstone Group, Colony Capital and Cerberus Capital Management, have created subsidiaries to back small-time investors who own a handful of houses. Blackstone's new venture is called B2R Finance, while Colony Capital has launched Colony American Finance and Cerberus backs FirstKey Lending.

Nearly one quarter of the country's single-family houses -- about 17 million units -- are not occupied by their owners. Some are not actively advertised for rent, and a portion are vacation homes. But the number "is a fairly good proxy" for the total number of rental houses nationwide, says Daren Blomquist of RealtyTrac, a real estate information company.

Since 2011, when the housing market turned around after a five-year lull, institutional investors -- those purchasing 10 or more houses in a calender year -- turned 632,000 or so houses into rentals to take advantage of their low prices and the growing desire of people to rent rather than own.

That leaves roughly 16 million houses that are owned by small-time investors. And those are the people firms like B2R Finance are hoping to serve.

Of course, you still need to have good credit and a hefty down payment of at least 25 percent. But if you meet those criteria and a few others, you might be in business.

The Charlotte-based B2R makes lending decisions largely on the cash flow of the underlying rental properties, as opposed to the borrower's personal debt-to-income ratio, which is a key determinate when lending to people who are actually going to live in the houses they are buying.

The company will lend from $300,000 to $3 million to what it calls "entrepreneurial" borrowers who own at least three houses, townhouses or condominium apartments worth at least $50,000 each, as well as multi-family apartment buildings smaller than 20 units. Loans will have fixed payments for a five- to 10-year term, but will be amortized as if they were 30-year mortgages.

Colony American Finance and FirstKey Lending offer similar terms or lines of credit for "flippers," who buy run-down houses and foreclosures, fix them up and resell.

Colony American's loans range from $500,000 for mom-and-pop investors to $60 million for large institutional investors. FirstKey provides loans of $500,000 to $500 million across a variety of loan products.

B2R will also finance a portfolio of rental houses with a commercial loan, but borrowers have to be corporations. Since many individual owners are not incorporated, they might consider setting up as limited liability companies.

So far, the company has loans with 200 or so borrowers -- each loan covers 15-20 properties -- and has "a very robust" future pipeline, a spokesman says. Significantly, it recently closed on the first-ever multi-borrower securitization -- that is, it bundled 144 loans backed by more than 3,000 properties into a security for sale to investors.