DotHomes is in the Running
photo credit: Matthew Sylvester
This from Techcrunch today, in The British Are Coming Back Soon.
DotHomes, the UK-based real estate search engine which now covers the US, UK and South Africa, says it has doubled its number of nationwide real estate listings in the US, bringing its database up to two million residential properties for sale and rent. By contrast, Yahoo Real Estate, Roost, Trulia and Zillow (and others) get feeds from brokers and MLS services in the US. From a natural language search, DotHomes generates direct links to the original source of information – the listing agent/broker – by sending out Google-like spiders to crawl sites. But DotHomes reckons it is now neck and neck with Trulia. That’s good but it needs more marketing partners if it’s to become better known in the US. DotHomes is funded by three of Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firms: The Accelerator Group; Arts Alliance; and Samos Investments.
The key line in there: “DotHomes reckons it is now neck and neck with Trulia.”
It’s an interesting statement, and one that sets up the natural response… By what reckoning?
Sheer numbers of listings should not the measure of a site’s success. Rather, it’s the quality of listings that is the better measure.
No sense touting the number of listings one has, if the majority (or even the minority) are expired, withdrawn or inaccurate.
Crawling listings seems to be a very clumsy way of getting an accurate representation of the true market of properties for sale, since many sites that are crawled are notoriously slow in updating their inventory. Broker feeds are perhaps a better way of capturing the market – but both Zillow, Trulia and Frontdoor suffer from some of the same inconsistencies when I’ve conducted a real estate search. I’ve stumbled on many homes that once I click through have somehow have become inactive.
Roost’s model of partnering with the local MLSes seems on the surface to be the best solution – being that the MLSes should have the most up-to-date data. But Roost too suffers by only having a patchwork of national coverage.
That leaves Realtor.com – the granddaddy of real estate search sites. And still the reigning champ on listings through their partnership with NAR. Too bad that their search experience is so muddied, that I still can’t figure out how to use it (though their Alpha site seems to hold some promise).
That said, kudos to DotHomes for their rapid growth since they launched in the US (see International Real Estate Search Site Makes a Move into US). Plus, I’m really digging the new look.
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Drew Izzo | Apr 25, 2008 | Reply
Hi Joel,
Drew from Roost here.
Thanks for the kind words about Roost. We feel strongly that we have the right model. We’re working very hard to launch more and more markets. You’ll see some new markets popping up on Roost shortly.
Gerry (RealtyMan) Bourgeois | Apr 26, 2008 | Reply
I agree that the Integrity of the data on ANY site is of utmost importance!
Also, you forgot to mention Homes.com as well. I spent 9 months as a ‘paying advertiser’ telling them (and even letting them know what the potential problem was) that their database (at least in Massachusetts) was Broken. An expired listing from 2004 was (and probably still is) showing on their site as active – and that is just One issue…
I am no longer supporting, nor paying anything, to them.
Ken Horst | Apr 27, 2008 | Reply
MLS Maps currently has coverage in 230 cities and metro area in the US, with over 50% of the listings available through a map based searched platform. We are adding map based search to more cities every month as it becomes available.
We use a Roost based model, with the mls listings be provided by local real estate agents and brokers.
Also, our analytics shows a growing trend in the use of “mls” and “map” in consumer search phrases.
We don’t “reckon” we are neck and neck with Trulia, we flat out past them months ago, based on number of listings accessable to our visitors as we cover 82% of the US population with the cities and metro areas where we have covaerage.
Artemi Krymski | Apr 27, 2008 | Reply
Joel,
Artemi from DotHomes here. Thanks for the mention. Please note that we’ve never said “we reckon we’re neck and neck with Trulia”, but simply stated that we’ve reached a similar level of coverage within 4 months. We still have a long way to go to match Trulia’s consumer reach in US. But we’re not a media company, we’re a technology company, and our level of funding reflects that.
Our aim is to provide an alternative to the MLS system, we see much more disruptive potential in that area than working with existing MLSes.
Quality of listings is indeed an issue as we’re not able to force brokers into the same contractual obligations as they have with MLSes. Currently we do several things to improve the quality of our listings:
- We link directly to the original listing on broker’s site
- We accept feeds from brokers who care to provide them
- We rank results by date and quality of listings
Of course, currently our search results are only as good as what’s on the broker’s sites. But we have to start somewhere. The MLS wasn’t build in a day. With time, I believe we’ll be able to put the right incentives in place for brokers to remove sold inventory from their sites.
And thanks for digging the new look
Milan | Apr 27, 2008 | Reply
Thanks for pointing out the beta Realtor.com it’s really quite an improvement over the existing system. Still got a few UI areas that need work, but the search options are actually really impressive.
Andrea Palacios | Apr 28, 2008 | Reply
Artemi, interesting stuff you are doing with DotHomes.com. Just curious if there are any legal implications since you are displaying MLS data and listing data on DotHomes without permission from those original sources. Are you able to do that because you show a limited amount of data and link back to the original site? I know that you are more like a search engine, but I can see realtor.com not liking what you are doing? How do you think this will play out?
Overland Park Real Estate | Apr 28, 2008 | Reply
I feel some of the things you talked about are what makes local broker’s sites so successful. While the national sites are nice and get a lot of exposure, they often run into problems with old listings. The local broker sites are directly fed from the local MLS IDX which means the listings will more often have the quality that you speak of (not expired, pending, etc).