There's plenty of innovation occurring in the Seattle area in online real estate, from Estately and Findwell to Redfin and Zillow.com. But don't forget about the traditional real estate brokerages which also are breaking ground in the sector. Today, John L. Scott Real Estate announced a partnership with Microsoft to create a new social network called JLSconnect.

The new service is part of an ongoing partnership between Microsoft and John L. Scott, adding to the "Property Tracker' function that allows people to save homes that may be of interest. JLSconnect works in conjunction with "Property Tracker" -- utilizing Microsoft's Silverlight, Virtual Earth and Live Messenger technologies -- to allow people to exchange comments about properties with others.

J. Lennox Scott, chief executive of the real estate company, said that the new service will help people get feedback from others in their "sphere of influence."

“Buying a home is not an individual activity; there are usually several people involved in the process from friends and family to real estate agents,” said Scott in a statement. “This experience illustrates the value of providing a collaborative online tool that allows buyers to leverage social networking as a part of their home search.”

You can read more on the implementation in Microsoft exec Sam Chenaur's blog, where he writes that John L. Scott is using Microsoft's cloud services to help buyers collaborate with friends, family and agents. Chenaur writes:

What makes this so interesting is that John L. Scott is composing four ‘cloud’ building block services—Live ID, Live Contacts, Live Presence, Live Messenger, and Virtual Earth—into its on-premises powered Web site, all powered by a Silverlight interface to glue the experience together.

JLS is the first real estate company to embrace social networking in such a way. They’re targeting their Gen X and Gen Y agents with this solution to begin the process of reinventing how consumers and agents can collaborate around the home buying experience. It represents the most advanced thinking to date in the real estate industry.