Yahoo revamps real estate site
Bigger pictures, more neighborhood info
By Inman News, Tuesday, December 9, 2008.Photos accompanying listings on Yahoo Real Estate are now four times bigger, and listings update automatically as users refine search parameters, the company said in announcing a revamp of the site.
Agents, brokers, multiple listing services and listings aggregators can supply more detailed home specs when submitting their listings, and search results now include deeper neighborhood information and recommendations for comparable listings, said Steve Schultz, Yahoo Real Estate's senior director, in a post on the company's corporate blog.
Yahoo Real Estate is also testing neighborhood profile videos, starting in San Francisco. Schultz promised more new features early next year, including an even greater emphasis on property photos and "meaty new personalization and sharing services."
The revamp is part of a new "open real estate strategy" that follows on the heels of the expiration of the site's exclusive relationship with Prudential Real Estate, Schultz said. Since opening up Yahoo Real Estate to a wider range of data sources -- including 70 top real estate brokers and 50 MLSs -- the site has grown to more than 3.2 million for-sale listings. And that's not counting foreclosures and new homes.
In October, Realtor.com -- the official site of the National Association of Realtors, and the Web's most popular real estate portal -- unveiled updates to the site that included listings "time stamped" for freshness and 140 percent larger photos. Other improvements included improved search tools and a home valuation tool that taps data on sold listings from MLSs, site operator Move Inc. said (see story).
According to online metrics tracking firm Hitwise, Realtor.com has the largest market share of traffic to real estate-related Web sites, exceeding the combined share of second-place Yahoo Real Estate and third-place Zillow in October.
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Submitted by John Rowles on December 10, 2008 - 7:23am.
As Mike Parker pointed out in a piece that was picked up by the WSJ's MarketWatch site, calling Realtor.com the "Web's most popular Real Estate portal "in the Real Estate vertical" is the same thing as calling me the greatest baseball player who ever lived "in this house."
Parker's math is straight-forward: Google has 65% of the general search audience. It handles 85 Billion searches a month. They estimate that 13% of those are Real Estate-related. That equals 870 million Real Estate searches compared to Realtor.com's 7 million "page views" a month (and most unique visits account for multiple page views).
A "portal" is the site people use at the beginning of a Web-based task to locate the sites that have the information and/or functions they need to complete that task. Google is, clearly, the most popular Real Estate portal, which makes the question of where Google sends its users for Real Estate information in your market once they click through that portal THE key Web marketing question brokers and agents need to address.
John Rowles
Managing Director
MainRhode LLC
www.mainrhode.com
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