Dothomes.com is for sale.

Google PR 4. Yours for the right price.

Dothomes was one of a number of overseas property portal sites that tried in the last few years to make their way on to US shores. Turns out playing in the US market is much more complicated than they thought.

Much ballyhooed at the time (see DotHomes is in the Running), Dothomes was a product of BytePlay Ltd, which also had a presence in the UK and South Africa – no word if those sister sites will stay active though.

The reason for the sale? From the founder directly, “real estate was never our cup of tea…”

So the company is changing their strategy to provide “enterprise data acquisition solutions in UK.” The sale of Dothomes will be conducted by private auction and will conclude October 1st. I’ve asked for a link to the auction site, and will post here as soon as I can.

Globrix, the News Corp backed site, is the only overseas portal that I’ve heard is still pondering a US based entry. News of Dothomes’ retreat may make them a little more wary however.

Photo courtesy of wizardofthefiretopmountain

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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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As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of much of the innovation in Real Estate 2.0 that’s happened overseas – remember Igglo, for example? The Norwegian Finnish site that allows people to bid on homes that aren’t even for sale (kind of a reverse Make Me Move price). Read Wikipedia article for more, if you’re interested.

It seems like for much of the last year we have been so busy watching the US market, we’ve been ignoring many of the moves being made overseas.

That’s starting to change. This was definitely one of the themes emerging from Connect earlier this month. Whether it was Canadian investors swooping in on the glut of inventory in Phoenix, or Europeans pouncing on New York apartments or Florida condos; courting international buyers definitely was tops in a lot of people’s minds.

Mirroring this international buying trend, UK search site DotHomes (formerly Extate) has jumped across the pond to launch in the US today. Not really a big surprise frankly; the British realty blog Renthusiast tipped us off to this move earlier last year.

DotHomes was founded a couple of years ago by Artemi Krymski and Douglas De Jager, two computer science students from Imperial College in London, and has to date been serving the UK and South African markets.

As real estate portals go, DotHomes has done some pretty innovative stuff. They were one of the first portals to adopt video (see Extate Launches Video Tours) – even going so far as to allow mobile MMS uploads of video tours to the site.

In August of last year, De Jager announced that they had received their first round of funding from The Accelerator Group (TAG), a venture capital group which has also backed the sites MoveMe.com and Agent Provocateur (at first, I thought was this was the best name ever for a real estate related site – turns out it’s a lingerie brand, which is also pretty cool and possibly NSFW). Presumably much of this funding was designed to help them with this launch into the US.

DotHomes hopes to differentiate itself in the US by acting as a pure search play – and even goes so far as to call it itself the “Google of Real Estate”. Unlike Trulia or Zillow, it doesn’t source broker feeds directly and unlike Roost, it doesn’t have any relationships with the MLSes (see Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart). Rather it relies on its search spiders to seek out the listings wherever they reside on the Internet.

Obviously there are two big problems with this approach. “Crawl” listings and you quickly run into quality and quantity issues. The latter because it’s near impossible to get complete market coverage, and the former because what you do find are often out of date or inaccurate. Nevermind that it has pissed people off in the past too.

That said, DotHomes insists it’s going to have a go at it. It hopes to monetize the site through selling advertising for ancillary services (mortgage, insurance etc.) around whatever listings it can find and pacifying the brokers by sending them some free traffic and not just selling them their listings back.

In any case, I suspect this won’t be the last of the international sites that decide to dip their toes into the US market. Especially if it’s just a matter of cloning pre-existing technology and then tailoring the experience to suite the international buyer (kind of a throw-it-against-the-wall-see-if-it-sticks approach).

If there’s one thing to take away from this; it’s that while the Internet may have not had much of an impact on local real estate yet, it’s definitely kicked the door down for international real estate.

If you haven’t already, watch this Inman TV episode and listen closely to what Simon Baker from realestate.com.au is saying – it’s a big, big world out there with lots and lots of buyers. Now’s the time to come up for air and take a look around.

For more on some of the other U.K. based property search engines check out:

• Extate Cranks Up the Heat
• Zoomf Aims to Help British Home Buyers
• OnOneMap Gives You More
• Nestoria Conquers Real Estate in Facebook

Also check out some other great International real estate blogs:

• the aforementioned Renthusiast
• theRatandMouse – London’s property blog
• Nubricks Overseas Property Investment Blog
  
• HousePriceCrash.co.uk

More coverage:

• 4realz.net is skeptical.

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