There are quite a few new real estate listing sites popping up; it seems like this year is becoming the year of the listings. And it’s an all out race to get the most listings and the most visitors.
There are sites that:
-get listings from broker feeds
-use spiders to crawl listing sites
-invite consumers/realtors to post listings
-use IDX to syndicate listings
-use some combination of the above
It has reached a point where the general search experience is becoming eerily similar. This considered, I was surprised when I got an email about the upcoming today’s U.S launch of DotHomes (www.dothomes.com). While the site is very popular in foreign countries (e.g. South Africa, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), I was a bit skeptical about the launch of another listing engine in the U.S.
So, I talked to Douglas de Jager (co-founder of dothomes) to see what’s unique/different about dothomes’ market approach. During the call he demonstrated dothome’s vertical search engine and querying interface. And I must say that I was very impressed with the ease of use and the powerful search functionality.
On other sites, you can search listings by city and state and filter the results using pre-configured criteria (i.e. price, bed rooms, etc). However, dothomes allows for intelligent searches that includes keywords and keyword phrases. For example, you can do a search for “Ocean view in miami” or find homes near “Microsoft Redmond.” You can even apply price filters directly from the search box. Try this search: “open house in houston for 250k to 2m”
Ohh and dothomes has indexed and launches today with over 1 million listings.
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