Tom over at the Seattle Property News summed the current state of real estate search with this question: “Is there a regional bubble in online real estate sites?”
From a consumer’s point-of-view, it is wonderful that home buyers (and sellers!) are starting to see so many options come on the market. I’ve really enjoyed following as more and more of these tools come on-line and I thought I would take today to review some of the posts I’ve had on real estate search. If you are looking to freshen up on the future of real estate search, there is lots of information (and links to more info) in the following articles:
- (Oct 26) Google Base Heads into Real Estate? Discussion of the possibility of Google to show real estate listings.
- (Oct 20) The Rebirth of Redfin: Analysis of Redfin’s home search tool.
- (Oct 19) Better Late than Never: Analysis of HomePages’ home search tool.
- (Oct 1) : Agents: Are you prepared?: Discussion on how new real estate search tools will affect the real estate agents.
- (Sep 28) Trulia Better Search Engine: Analysis of Trulia’s home search tool.
- (Sep 11) Latest Stab at On-line Mapping: Analysis of Windermere’s home search tool.
- (Sep 1) Even More Real Estate Tools in the Works: Discussion of Rich Barton (Zillow) and Barry Diller’s potential entry into Real Estate.
- (Aug 30) More real estate mapping: MLS Maps Online: Analysis of MLSMapsOnline’s tool for real estate search. (Note that they’ve changed their name to website to www.ltdmaps.com and they’ve added a bunch of new features, like parcel data for the entire state of Washington since this review).
- (Aug 29) Shack Prices: Analysis of Shack Prices’s tool (sold home data over Google Maps for the Seattle area).
- (Aug 25) More on Real Estate Search Technologies: Analysis of NeighborhoodScout’s tool.
- (Aug 24) Buyers and Sellers: Help is on the Way: Discussion on the potential of sites like Zillow and Realwide (now Trulia) to disrupt the status quo in on-line real estate search.
- (Jul 28) What is Zillow up to? : Background on Zillow.
- (May 3) gHomes: Seattle area MLS on Google Maps: Where I presented the first Google Maps hack to show MLS data.
As a fun little aside, when a new search site is announced I like to see the type of buzz that it is getting in the blogosphere. The chart from this post shows the relative buzz that Trulia, Redfin and Zillow have been getting.
Also, there are a few small search sites, like Propsmart, that I haven’t covered mainly because I simply don’t have anything interesting to say about them yet. However, if you are building (or have built) a real estate search site, I’m definitely interested in hearing about it!