Scripps Cracks Open the Door

I had a chance today to sit down and talk with the folks from the publishing giant Scripps, which is in the process of splitting itself into two divisions; traditional media publishing and a new interactive division (more on paidContent.org). One of their new Internet initiatives is a real estate site, Frontdoor.com.

I said in an earlier post when AOL relaunched its site (see A Dinosaur Stirs - AOL Real Estate Relaunches) that the big media conglomerates haven’t been ignoring the online trend in real estate and will be probably begin adopting much of what’s been pioneered to date by the Real Estate 2.0 crowd and rolling out their own web properties. Frontdoor.com is just the first of what I suspect will be a number of new real estate sites we’ll see.

Scripps owns the hugely popular HGTV brand, that is home to popular programs like “House Hunters” and “Designed to Sell”. Interestingly, they’ve said that despite the overall sluggishness in the market, the ratings for these real estate programs have not slowed down. According to the company, the most recent ratings even showed that the network had its highest ever prime time rating this past October.

Obviously, Scripps is hoping that their massive consumer brand awareness (they hit more than 95 million households on air) and that the cross-promotional opportunities that television presents will translate to a hugely popular online real estate destination.

One of the big challenges the Real Estate 2.0 crowd continues to face is building consumer awareness of their platforms. Sites like Zillow and Trulia have taken tentative steps towards building this recognition (see Trulia Hits the Streets), and while Scripps definitely fingers the two as competition, they are confident that they hold the edge.

Frontdoor’s major point of differentation is that they are trying mix together the killer combination of search and content to create the ultimate real estate portal - Dustin at 4Realz likes the concept too. This is something the Real Estate 2.0 crowd has also tried to do, to varying degrees of success. But while Zillow and Trulia are largely relying on User Generated Content - Scripps is banking on its archives of professionally produced content.

The question is, which will resonate most with consumers?

As far as the site itself, I was pretty impressed. It’s still in Beta, and so as yet it is not complete. Scripps assured me they have a full product road map in place and are in it for the long haul.

On the search side, listings are provided by broker feeds. Right now they claim to have about 40% of active listings - they expect to be up to about 50-60% within in the next month and to about 70% coverage by the first half of next year. To back that up, since news of the new site broke a few days ago, Scripps claims to have had over 200 requests from brokers to provide their feeds.

Search functionality was decent, and has some slick AJAX integration. I liked the expandable map and the site’s overall responsiveness to my queries. The search filters on the other hand seemed a little buried below the fold.

Again, this is all in Beta, and Scripps promises to add several layers of neighborhood and radius search in the near future. And interestingly, they said the way that expandable map will be implemented will be different based on urban and suburban searches.

I also don’t think they’ve quite nailed down the separation of content and search. The homepage seemed awfully crowded with information, which potentially could confuse consumers. Scripps should take a page from the Real Estate 2.0 play book and look to pare down the homepage a bit.

The big question is how they intend on monetizing the site. Advertising is the obvious route here and Scripps already has established relationships with major brand advertisers that they can leverage.

Where they go after that is still unclear; whether they go the Homescape model and leverage their platform to power their partner newspapers’ sites, or the Realtor.com model of providing Realtors with a featured-listing marketing platform.

If it’s the latter, I suspect they’ll enjoy a fair degree of success. Ultimately Realtors will want to put their ad dollars where the potential customers are and while the geek cred factor of Zillow and Trulia are high, Frontdoor may just yet challenge them on the consumer eyeballs.

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