Searching beyond the ZIP code
Onboard announces 'Lifestyle Listings Engine'
By Inman News, Wednesday, January 14, 2009.Onboard Informatics this month announced a "Lifestyle Listings Engine" that is intended to assist clients with real estate searches that go beyond the traditional search paradigm of ZIP codes and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.
"Let your users search for the best school system within their budget. Let your customers find homes in towns with a great nightlife, find neighbors they would get along with or a house within 20 minutes of their work," Onboard states in an announcement about its search platform.
Unveiled at the Real Estate Connect conference in New York City last week, Onboard's new listing tool draws from the company's collection of community information.
The Lifestyle Listings Engine can be tailored to display for-sale property listings via data-sharing agreements by brokers, in compliance with Internet Data Exchange (IDX) or new Virtual Office Web site (VOW) rules.
Users can choose to conduct real estate searches based on school system ratings, commute time, amenities and neighborhood information.
Marc Siden, Onboard CEO, said in a statement that the new offering layers on "a search logic that takes human preferences into account," billing it as "the first search engine that works the way the human mind does."
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Submitted by Victor Lund on January 14, 2009 - 4:22pm.
This is the first step down the path to combine natural language property search with lifestyle search. In parlance, Google long tail search meets property search with a tightly integrated 360 degree view of the property and its surroundings. Pretty impressive presentation of quality information that consumers are bound to enjoy. I look forward to seeing this live on a website soon.
Victor Lund
Partner
WAV Group
http://waves.wavgroup.com
http://www.wavgroup.com
Submitted by Catherine Read on January 14, 2009 - 9:46pm.
I agree this is where search is headed, and this is what Marc and Brian at 1000Watt Consulting have been talking about for some time now. It will be interesting to see how well this works because the concept is spot on.
Catherine S. Read
Creative Read, Inc.