Yahoo Real Estate Gives New Options to Realtors
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.
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9 Comment(s)
1 Trackback(s)
- From Yahoo immobilier | Dec 14, 2008
kent lardner | Dec 9, 2008 | Reply
If Yahoo really wants to catch up, I would invite Steve Schultz to look at a new product we have released Down Under recently!
http://www.slideshare.net/pdslive/user-guide-v8-presentation/
http://www.pricefinder.com.au/
Joseph Bridges | Dec 9, 2008 | Reply
You know I find it funny when companies have these products in addition to their paid search. To be it makes one question the value of their paid search. My brother does our Yahoo paid search and I do our Google but we have not explored their additional products. Anyone trying their other products?
Michael Sosnowski | Dec 11, 2008 | Reply
Sometimes I feel like I am alone on an islands. I just do not understand why realtors support any national portals. Sites like Yahoo RE, Trulia, Zillow, etc have one end-game in mind – to control the online real estate space at the expense of local realtors websites. If we did not provide them with our listings, they would have NOTHING!
Shawn | Dec 11, 2008 | Reply
I haven’t tried anything for yahoo when it comes to real estate, but have heard some good success stories. I’ll be experimenting with them and will share my results.
http://www.inexpensiveinvestinginflorida.com/
Thanks
Kevin Schmidtchen | Dec 11, 2008 | Reply
I think it is fine to give consumers more tools on the web to find what they are looking for with real estate. If the consumer then decides to buy or sell a property by just using these limited resources, that is their big mistake.
I have yet to meet someone that has “saved money” by just going on comps of zillow, yahoo, trulia etc. for example.
To me these are just good places to get started, but then you should always use a local Realtor to get true good local info, true comps on properties (so much goes into a sales price that the list could be 30 bullet points each time) etc.
I continue to shake my head at the seller who is happy to not pay the 5% commissions (FSBO), but spends days and weeks of their own time selling their home and gets a price of $925,000 and is happy they “saved money”…when a good agent would of got a sales price of $985,000 and thus saved the seller more money, time and expertise on disclosures, peace of mind etc.
I am simply a big fan of paying experts to do their job.
Mike Pannell ( Dallas Realtor) | Dec 12, 2008 | Reply
it looks like a good site, i need to go exploer a little bit.
Anam Arsalan | Dec 14, 2008 | Reply
Fairly good site!
True the colour is very appealing too?wish there was something like this for Indian audience as well.
Herschel | Jan 4, 2009 | Reply
I think this is great. The more resources available to people, the better. The marketplace is changing, and we have to be ready to be receptive to new ideas.
Ana in Dallas | Nov 4, 2009 | Reply
$50 bucks isn’t bad for added exposure, ever bit helps!