The real estate industry has been a “late bloomer” in the vertical search arena. Unlike their general-purpose cousins, such as the ones run by Google and Yahoo, vertical search engines contain information in their indexes about a specific topic. Vertical search is characterized by companies like Kayak and Expedia in travel, Shopping.com and Become.com in retail.
Vertical search has traditionally been dominated by the retail, financial services, travel and media and entertainment industries. Recently however, companies like Trulia, Propsmart and to some extent Zillow have started coalescing all of the data that consumers might need within the real estate industy into portals that users can use to find, or sell, their homes.
That’s the consumer side of why vertical search on real estate is important. The reason it’s important to real estate professionals is that it allows them to market their services or properties directly to highly qualified business prospects.
Real estate agents and brokers who fight to not have their listing show up on these vertical search engines end up doing themselves a disservice. They are losing possible business because of their failure to recognize the changing trend in their industry.
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