Zoomf Aims to Help British Home Buyers
With definitely one of the sillier names going in real estate (with the exception only perhaps of eMongoo), UK property search engine Zoomf plans a Q1 launch. Zoomf will be going head to head with existing real estate search sites like Nestoria and, to a lesser degree, extate.com.
Zoomf (is it ‘Zoom F’ or ‘Zoomph’?) may look familiar to readers this side of the pond, its search results pages look awfully similar to Trulia’s. I guess imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery.
In addition to a mashup of current properties for sale or for rent (let), Zoomf offers pricing guides for many of the neighborhoods (sorry, neighbourhoods) in and around London. Unfortunately, their search tools don’t work outside of the London area, at least for now.
Personally, I’m glad to see the Real Estate 2.0 space taking off in other parts of the world too. I lived in the UK a couple of years ago, and harbor fantasies about returning there some day with my family (I hold UK citizenship, in addition to Canadian and American) - so these sites are of particular interest to me.
For more on what’s happening in the UK, check out Mike Price’s Interview with Nestoria. Also, Renthusiast - a British real estate blog that I found quite informative (and blogrolled).
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5 Comment(s)
1 Trackback(s)
- From Renthusiast | Nov 3, 2006
Galen | Nov 2, 2006 | Reply
That’s awesome - they’re all the same! Trulia’s interface is taking over the UK via Zoomf and Nestoria! (You might check the link to Nestoria - it took me to Extate)
Joel Burslem | Nov 2, 2006 | Reply
Good catch Galen. Link has been updated with the proper URL.
Renthusiast | Nov 3, 2006 | Reply
we’re honored, thanks for the blogroll!
Dan | Nov 16, 2006 | Reply
I really cannot see how Zoomf or Nestoria have any value to anyone as they only crawl a small percentage of estate agent websites…. I search their sites but am still obliged to search other sites to ensure that i have a complete search. Property portals like Rightmove, Primelocation and Findaproperty have far more properties in their index. Also copying Trulia is really not very clever…the site has a very average search experience - nice map - but of course that is Google….anyone can copy that….
These sites need to do something more creative to win this really competitive market. With a couple of engineers Zoomf could be copied in a few weeks……after all the design was done for them in California…. I would say 2/10 for effort..:)
Mike Carter | May 25, 2007 | Reply
Hi everyone,
Sorry so late to respond. We’ve been busy.
To answer a couple things posed on this blog.
1. We are launching June 2, a slight delay but obviously we all learn as we go in the startup environment.
2. We are big fans of both Trulia and Zillow in the USA. That said, vertical search for real estate is at a very early stage. Soon we will all be looking a little different from each other. But yes, a search results page will look similar (for now). Wait until June 2. Also, there are big market differences with the US and the UK. That will slowly emerge as our product pipeline kicks into gear.
3. ‘a couple engineers, zoomf could be copied’
You are only looking at the front end which changes to a Wicket environment on June 2. The back end is a completely scalable google-bot type architecture. In fact, I believe we have some world’s best deep-web technology. We’ll be announcing something very interesting in August.
Last week we added another 12,000 listings and 80 agents. 1 week. A couple engineers cannot make a vertical specific crawler that goes into the deep web in a couple weeks. A couple engineers could make a front end with 4 scraped websites. There is a big difference.
Happy to hear comments on the new Zoomf come June 2.
Mike@zoomf