Inman is reporting that the Houston MLS has decided to move forward with allowing postings of their properties to Google Base. With Zillow’s recent move, I’m not surprised. Like I mentioned in my last post, we hadn’t yet heard from the real “big boys” on the Web, and I think we’re starting to now.
The MLS-supplied property information displayed at Google Base contains links that direct consumers to the association’s own property listings site for more details, and that site, in turn, directs users to its members’ Web sites. The association’s property-search site is popular among consumers, drawing about 700,000 unique visitors in November, Hale said. About 23,000 brokers and agents participate in the association’s MLS, and the association hosts about 56,000 active listings.
Like Greg mentioned in, real estate search is local. You only care about what you can find in your area the easiest. Google is already a place you go to, so if it becomes easy to find a house for sale there, then there’s a high probability that you’ll end up there if you’re looking for a house in Houston now.
Let’s see how this plays out. Google will be a force to reckon with if they can get a large amount of the MLSs on board. Houston isn’t enough, but it’s a start.
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The Empire Strikes Back . . ….
Realty Thoughts, via Inman: Houston MLS goes GoogleBase. An interesting question would be: To whom can they now say, “No”…?
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Who’s the 900 pound gorilla? Google’s the 900 pound gorilla and he’s peeing on the Zillow tree. Oh my.
The can of worms has officially been opened. If MLS’s start to release listings to Google… how can they say no to Zillow or anyone else? Will home listings someday become a commodity like mapping? This should be interesting.
No, Houston alone is not enough but as the second largest local Association it is a great start.
Mohave County in Arizona won’t be enough either, but I’m pushing hard for this there as well. I think it would even be a bigger benefit to a smaller area like mine than it would be for a place like Houston. Especially if we can do it soon.
Todd, agreed, it will take a lot for Google to get all the MLS’s on board, but they’re one of the only web companies that could even go that route and hope to succeed.
My mls still uses words that most home buyers don’t use to search for homes. Unless the mls uses Rich Text, having the listings on google will not result in sales. My mls uploades their info to realtor.com. If you do a search in google for listings, you’ll find realtor.com listings about 20 pages back. Do you really think the consumer will go that far back? Agents who have invested time and Rich Text in their listings will do much better.
As a Houston resident and real estate invester I can vouch that Houston is a great start for Google. http://www.HAR.com is an excellent site and the Houston Associaiton of Realtors has always been forward-looking with regards to technology. We’ll see if the other MLS’s follow suit. http://www.equityscout.com/public/blog1384.aspx
This is going to be interesting, but many MLS’ don’t provide info that is SE friendly.