HotPads Ready to Rumble and Flush with New Cash
HotPads.com, the apartment and rental home search engine and one of the founding members of Real Estate 2.0, had been awfully quiet lately. (For more, read Renters Arm Themselves With Info)
This week however they burst back on the scene with a brand new features, new maps , new imagery and more importantly - $2.3 million dollars in VC financing.
On the surface, the site has not changed all that much and the interface is still a little too cartoony for my tastes. The icons, while visually interesting (they bounce!), consume way too much screen real estate on a map search and make the search experience a little clumsy in my opinion.
Anyway, here’s a full list of the new features from their press release:
- New HotPads Maps
- Microsoft Satellite Mapping Integration
- Neighborhood and City Demographic and Housing Stats with Wikipedia
- Articles
- Political Party Affiliation Mapping
- Demographic and Housing Heat Maps
- Points of Interest Mapping including Schools, Universities and Public
- Transportation
What is most interesting to me out of this list are the heat maps, which you can now layer over a search and show datasets like population density, per capita income and median rent. Clicking on any of these adds Neighboroo-like color coding of the data to any map view.
Drilling down to a particular apartment takes you to an expanded property view which gives you a couple of slick features; a dynamic slide show of photos (should any exist) and the ability to tag the listing to del.icio.us and even share it on Facebook - a feature I’m think more of the real estate search engines should adopt. (Unfortunately the Facebook feature did not work for me exactly as I had hoped - it posted a generic Hotpads promo to my profile rather than details on the rental itself.)
Onto the bigger picture however, and what this announcement signals to me is that Spring not only means a new home buying season, but a renewed push for new financing by the Real Estate 2.0 front runners. They’ve all now seen a couple of full business cycles and are probably sucking on the fumes of their angel rounds.
They’re also heading into tougher market environment these days and probably need to top up their bank accounts; so Redfin is out beating on doors and Trulia may be next. Pretty much the only guy smiling is Zillow who is still sitting pretty on top of a mountain of cash.
More on HotPads new deal from Screenwerk.
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5 Comment(s)
4 Trackback(s)
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Shaun McLane | May 17, 2007 | Reply
As much as I like hotpads, I hadn’t given them much thought recently until seeing this post. I think they could be on to something with the Facebook integration if they could make it work like you’d expect it to work. The additions are nice, but I agree with the UI needing some tweeks…nothing $2.3m can’t help, I’m sure.
Boston Real Estate | May 17, 2007 | Reply
Not do downplay HotPads, but I don’t get it? What are they doing to grab all this attention? With apartments.com and rent.com and rentnet.com that have millions behind them and dwarf them in traffic….what am I missing?
Albuquerque real estate | May 18, 2007 | Reply
The facebook integration has a lot of potential, and they seem to have a lot of intuitive features. It will be interesting to see how they stack up against some of the giants in the industry.
Douglas Pope - HotPads.com | May 18, 2007 | Reply
We are working on improving the share on facebook functionality. Facebook is automatically filling in the default message with our the title of our page and some meta-tags. The user can change this default message to a custom one that is more suitable when their are sharing a specific listing. Hopefully we can figure out a good solution for this, we didn’t realize it was happening until this blog post…so thanks!!
We love all of the feedback. Thanks to all!!
Chris Lengquist | May 23, 2007 | Reply
I love Hotpads but they need more market penetration here in Kansas City. I have posted a property on there and did get two inquiries over the course of 2 weeks that said they had seen it on Hotpads. For renting, craigslist still works best. But I want Hotpads to succeed.