Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.

The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still needs to go a bit further to keep pace with some of the technology leaders.

While the new Y!RE experience is intuitive, I found as I dug deeper into the results, it began to feel like there was often one too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. This was a little frustrating frankly.

More importantly however, the individual listing pages still felt somewhat spartan and vaguely underwhelming, especially compared to some of the newer search offerings like those on MRIS’ HomesDatabase (see MRIS Takes on the Search Sites).

All that said however, Steve Schultz, Senior Director for Yahoo! Real Estate writes on the Yahoo! blog that this is just the beginning; more is coming, including “a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services.”

In conjunction with the new public face to Yahoo! Real Estate, the company has also introduced a range of new features for Real Estate professionals. Brokers, if you’re already syndicating your listings to the portal, you can now log into Yahoo! and manage them all online.

Agents interested in tapping Yahoo!’s reach can purchase a classifieds listing on the site for $49.95 and are also encouraged by the company to give Yahoo! Sponsored Search a whirl to build traffic to their websites.

Despite a tough market and months of turmoil at the company, Yahoo! has made some impressive strides over the last couple of years in this space, and it looks like they are still committed to seeing their presence dial up. I’m looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.

Yahoo! Real Estate, Yahoo!, real estate search, real estate 2.0, real estate

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Microsoft launches a $44.6 Billion unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo.

Let’s assume for a moment that the deal will stick (and it certainly sounds like it’s farther along than we think) – what does it mean for online real estate?

First and foremost, it likely means consolidation at the top of the real estate portals as the #2 and #3 sites (according to ComScore) will probably merge.

MSN Real Estate has been the ugly stepchild of the Real Estate 2.0 crowd to date – merely an afterthought, despite its massive monthly traffic.

Yahoo Real Estate, by contrast, has been pushing out new features steadily and is clearly the superior of the two destinations. No doubt in my mind – Y!RE will win out and become the dominant destination. This is surely great news in the minds of the folks at Yahoo who have been troubled by their future for weeks (see What’s in Store for Yahoo Real Estate).

Who this impacts most is Move.com – partly because they’ll see a combined entity nipping at the heels of Realtor.com, but also because they currently power MSN’s real estate searches (and no doubt draw a bunch of their own traffic from those searches).

Will Y!RE under its tent, MSN will likely push that relationship to the side and focus on tying all of its new properties under a revamped real estate destination.

A revitalized MicroHoo mega-portal is something that the other Real Estate 2.0 participants must dread as well. Especially since most are now into the second and third years of operations and are still hoping to gain traction amongst consumers. This could be the final nail in their coffins.

In any case, all speculation at this stage. But definitely fun to think about.

More:

• Greg Sterling gives ‘Micro-Hoo’ the Local Angle

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There have been numerous rumblings over the last week that suggest that Yahoo is planning to lay off hundreds of employees in an attempt to shed some weight and boost its profitability. Now the New York Times is reporting it, suggesting the announcement could come at the end of the month.

So how is this going to affect Yahoo Real Estate?

It’s certainly still one of the most popular real estate destinations online – just behind Realtor.com and MSN Real Estate (according to ComScore, see Real estate Web traffic increasing).

But the portal is a bit of an anomaly in Real Estate 2.0. Rather than build much itself – it has instead focused its strategy on aggregating the best features from other Yahoo assets and around the ‘Net (listings from Pru, valuation from Zillow and eppraisal.com, foreclosures from RealtyTrac, etc. etc.), then wrap them in display advertising and leverage its cross-property traffic to drive pageviews (see A conversation with Michael Yang, General Manager of Yahoo Real Estate).

Their latest release adds content to a new Guides and Advice section, which layers in one more destination for that traffic to go on the site. (Full Disclosure: The new section incorporates content from Inman News, my employer, and I helped negotiate that relationship).

Unfortunately, adding more to the mix just means more of a schizophrenic experience on the site. With so many places to go – I find it, quite honestly, overwhelming and ultimately disappointing.

The sad thing is, Yahoo Real Estate, despite its impressive traffic numbers, has always felt like kind of an afterthought by the company – especially when placed against some of its more developed sections like Yahoo Finance. Which is why the news of impending layoffs must surely be troubling.

Sramana Mitra, writing over on GigaOm today, implores Yahoo to Please Put Up A Fight. He writes:

Yet another segment that is moving online is real estate classifieds. Borell Associates predicts that by 2012, newspaper real estate ad revenue will hit $3.2 billion, while online real estate ad revenue will surpass that at $3.4 billion. In 2007, total ad spending on real estate dropped 3 percent, but online advertising soared 25.8 percent to $2.6 billion due to a shift to online from print. Yahoo doesn’t have much of a presence in online real estate — ZipRealty is a ripe and cheap acquisition target.

Mitra is right on when she said that Yahoo hasn’t nearly captured what it could in real estate advertising – but misses the boat completely when she suggests that the portal should acquire ZipRealty. I doubt Yahoo has any interest at all in running a brokerage. Besides, that wouldn’t give them any slice of the advertising pie anyway.

If Yahoo is serious about acquiring a stake in online real estate (which, I can’t tell if is) – a better target might be a company like Trulia, who already has a business model in place to secure some of those classifieds dollars.

A move like that would require some serious re-jigging of their model but maybe that’s just what they need to do.

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Yahoo! Finance is the online Goliath in the financial news space. Netratings puts its December page views at over 600 million, more than twice its closest competitor, MSN Money. (Source: 24/7 Wall St.: Yahoo! Finance Beats The Competition)

Last week, they retooled the site and added a number of new content options. CNET reported that these included “how-to guides for tax planning, budgeting, real estate planning, and saving for college and retirement.”

Of course that second-to-last option caught my eye, so I headed over to check it out. All in all, Yahoo! Finance’s real-estate section is pretty comprehensive; it features a number of expert opinions, mortgage rate information and a selection of calculators (none as comprehensive as HouseMath 2.0 ), as well as it pulls questions from Yahoo! Answers.

I wondered how this redesign would impact Yahoo! Real Estate however, so I emailed Michael Yang, General Manager of Yahoo Real Estate with the question. Here is a portion of his response:

We are sister units. Y! Finance is designed for people who want to enjoy, manage and grow their money. They are focused on programming rich editorial experiences around money. Naturally, real estate certainly plays a role. Yahoo! Real Estate is tasked with providing users with the specific tools and products they need when making a home purchase or renting an apartment, etc. The groups work closely together to ensure we’re offering our users the right tools and information, regardless of which site they are visiting.

More specifically, yes, you will see more sharing between the two groups, with Yahoo! Real Estate consuming Yahoo! Finance content and publishing on our side, and Yahoo! Finance consuming Yahoo! Real Estate listings and publishing on their side. If you look right now, Yahoo! Finance has links to “Search for Homes for Saleâ€? and “Check Home Valuesâ€? (which leads users over to Yahoo! Real Estate) as part of the “Things To Doâ€? section in the footer of every page of Personal Finance. We have a roll-out plan with them over the next few months – starting with the incorporation of a Real Estate Search Box in Personal Finance.

Overall, I like the look of the new page, but it does feel kind of static. Kind of soul-less.

One glaring omission is the lack of any real estate blogs. I’d love to see them supplement their ‘expert’ columnists with a smattering of real estate related blog posts. You could allow bloggers to submit their RSS feeds for inclusion, as a way to liven up the page with fresh content, for example. In my opinion, that would make the page far more immediate, and much less cold, than the current incarnation.

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Yahoo! Search Marketing rolled out its new advertising platform, dubbed Panama, today.

The biggest leap forward with Panama is that Yahoo has greatly simplified the process of signing up and purchasing CPC advertising on its properties. This is great news for all marketers.

Panama basically boils down the process to down to five simple steps, which means most folks will be up and running in no time flat.

So, to try this out, I thought I might try and buy some advertising for this blog. Here’s what I found.

Step 1. Choose a Geographic Location

I chose Entire Market (United States and Canada). I figured I might as well shoot wide – but you could refine your location to target a particular geographic area. Panama lets you plug in a zip code and a radius search to localize your ad even more specifically.

Step 2. Pick Your Keywords

Quite often when I get to this point I start to draw a blank about which keywords I’m going to choose. Thankfully Panama’s algorithm lets you type in some words that describe your product or service and it returns a number of suggested keyword combinations for you.

For the purposes of this experiment I used the terms ‘real estate’, ‘real estate marketing’ and ‘real estate consulting’ (hey, why not?). Out of the list Panama gave me, I picked the following 16 keywords:

real estate marketing tool
real estate agent marketing
real estate marketing idea
real estate marketing online
realtor marketing
real estate advertising
real estate advertising marketing
real estate web site
real estate internet marketing
real estate marketing strategy
real estate marketing plan
real estate marketing technique
real estate marketing system
advertising for realtor
marketing real estate web site
real estate lead generation

Step 3. Set Your Daily Advertising Budget

I figured I’d spend about $4 a day ($120 a month). Not extravagant by any means, but realistic given what little revenue this blog generates. I suspect this is in line with what a single Realtor would be spending as well, with large producers or Brokers spending significantly more.

Panama tells me that’ll let me get a maximum bid of $0.85 and result in 99,330 monthly impressions and 197 monthly clicks.

Of course this will vary considerably depending on what keywords you select in step 2.

Step 4. Create Your Ad

Here you can let your creative juices fly. Unfortunately for me, it’s late in the day and I’m pretty wiped so this is the best I could come up with. Hopefully you’ll be more successful.

Step 5. Activate Your Ad

Punch in your billing information and off you go! And this is where I stopped.

I really like Panama’s ease of use and I think its localization options will be especially valuable to real estate marketers.

My biggest concern is that I’m not sure it’s the right place to be spending my money. Just looking at my own traffic logs, I get barely any traffic at all from Yahoo’s search engine right now. Traffic from Google dwarfs it nearly 10 to 1. And that’s the crux of the problem.

No matter how many improvements it rolls out to its platform, Yahoo will be the perennial second placer behind Google AdWords. Despite pioneering the PPC concept (when it was Overture), Yahoo just can’t compete to the depth of Google’s network and the stranglehold it has on search.

I suppose if you can afford to add Yahoo to your PPC advertising plan, or if you’re experienced enough with AdWords and want to extend your reach, Panama will definitely make it easier to add Yahoo to your media mix.

But if you have a small budget and are just looking to dip your toes into PPC advertising, as I suspect is the case with most Realtors, I still think you’re better off sticking with Google.

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A recent post on real estate 2.x stirs up the old question about Zillow’s business model once again. According to an anonymous commenter on that site (who lays out a lengthly calculation) “every man woman and child on earth must visit Zillow 2.0 times EACH per year” in order for Zillow to be profitable enough to pay back its investors.

Clearly, following that logic, advertising can’t be Zillow’s only planned revenue source. Now you have Yahoo’s CFO warning of a slowdown in advertising sales, and their stock drops 11% in response. Zillow has repeatedly said they are a media site – but I just don’t buy it. To bet the future solely on advertising revenue would be suicidal, in my opinion.

Of course there’s potential licensing fees from its partner deals, but even that seems limited since they’re just giving away their API. Some have even fretted about Zillow’s potential entry into the real estate brokerage game, but I doubt that’s likely to happen – I’m sure they don’t want the hassles.

What’s a site like Zillow to do?

WebHomeUSABlog brings up an interesting point that maybe Zillow’s endgame isn’t profitibility after all, but rather acquisition by one of the big three Internet giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). I suspect this is the most likely exit strategy Zillow’s executive team is gunning for.

So, just out of curiosity, I thought I’d throw the question out to the crowd. If Zillow were to be acquired – who’s going to do it?

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Dustin Luther over Rain City Guide has posted the replies to a series of community-generated questions asked about Yahoo! Real Estate.

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With the launch of Yahoo! Real Estate’s new home page this week, the online real estate search space is heating up again. I’m interested in what the real estate community and readers of this blog think about all the new options for home shoppers out there.So, I’ve posted a new poll on my site, which will be a totally unscientific way of determining which is the best real estate search site out there. You can vote on which of the real estate search sites you think is the most user friendly; which I’d define as the one that has the clearest interface, cleanest design and widest feature set or more simply, the one you’d recommend to your friends, family or clients.

The poll will stay open until Thursday, September 7th. A winner will be declared on the following Friday

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Yahoo launched a redesign of its Real Estate page today, incorporating a new map search interface, an IDX feed and historical market data from Zillow. The new site site also more deeply integrates Zillow’s Zestimate charts into all of their real estate classifieds.

First impressions are, this is a very nice effort. It’s a clean, simple search interface that’s very comprehensive and intuitive and delivers a great user experience. Yahoo! Real Estate has accomplished what Trulia has been trying to do all along. Plus it has the brand recognition and marketing muscle to back it and push real estate search even further into the mainstream.

Trulia should be very worried, now that the big Internet giants are redoubling their efforts in the online real estate space. Maybe their mascots should spend less time sitting on the can, and more time trying to figure out how they’re going to stand up in the face of this renewed offensive into their turf.

More on the new Yahoo! Real Estate site from Greg Sterling: Yahoo! Makes Real Estate More ‘Local’

(Full disclosure: I work for a Prudential affiliate, which maintains an exclusive broker relationship with Yahoo! Real Estate).

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