Searching for real estate gets a facelift

Posted December 8th, 2008 at 8:00 am by Steve Schultz, Yahoo! Real Estate

 13 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

2008 has obviously been a tough year for the real estate market –- we have surging inventories, record foreclosures, and banks with tight lending policies. But if you’re thinking about jumping into the market, 2009 could be a great year to find your dream home at an affordable price. The team at Yahoo! Real Estate has been working hard to make the house-hunting process easier and more efficient.

For the prospective homebuyer, it all starts with search. According to the National Association of Realtors, 87% of homebuyers use the Internet to search for their next home. More importantly, 32% cited the Internet as the place where they found the home they eventually purchased – a fourfold increase since 2001. So I’m pleased to announce the launch of Yahoo! Real Estate’s new home search experience. Head to our homepage, enter your search criteria and hit search.

Our research indicates that homebuyers want their searches to be fast and efficient, and they want as much data and multimedia as they can get their hands on. So our pages now load twice as fast and our photos are now four times bigger. And as you refine your search parameters (price, number of bedrooms, etc.), the listing results update automatically. We also enabled our listing partners to provide much richer home specs, and you’ll find deeper neighborhood information and recommendations for comparable listings. We’re also testing new neighborhood profile videos – we’re starting with San Francisco listings, with more major cities to come.

This launch is the result of our new open real estate strategy. For many years, Yahoo! Real Estate had an exclusive relationship with Prudential Real Estate. While Prudential remains an important partner, earlier this year we opened Yahoo! to a wide range of home data sources, including more than 70 of the top real estate brokers, 50 multiple listings services and 40 real estate listings services. We now source over 3.2 million for-sale listings (excluding foreclosures and new construction listings) and expose them to over 5.5 million people a month, according to comScore.

There’s far more innovation ahead. We have a steady stream of new features due out early next year that includes a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services. In the meantime, happy house-hunting.

Steve Schultz
Senior Director, Yahoo! Real Estate

Tagged: news, search, yahoo! real estate

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13 Comments Add your own

Steve Perre | December 9th, 2008 at 7:54 am

I’m curious after no longer working exclusively with Prudential Real Estate if you only work with the major brokers in the business or do small independent offices have a chance at posting their listings on your site? Since I’ve made numerous attempts and have been turned down citing a refusal to accept new vendors. If I were a major office would the rule still apply?

Steve Schultz | December 10th, 2008 at 9:32 am

@Steve Perre – Thanks for your comment. We work with all brokerage firms big and small who want to syndicate listings to Yahoo!. We work directly with large regional and national real estate brokers who deliver listings feeds to our system. We refer small local offices to aggregation and syndication service partners such as ThreeWide, Point2, and HotPads.

Jayson | December 10th, 2008 at 10:43 am

I like the slick new look and I’m sure users will appreciate faster load times, access to more homes, larger pictures and greater access to multi-media.

I look forward to seeing Yahoo! lead through innovation in the real estate arena.

J. L. Winn | December 10th, 2008 at 11:56 am

Hi Steve,

I enjoyed reading about the new Yahoo! Real Estate classified enhancements here and on Inman News.

As a long time, high volume content provided to Yahoo! I wanted to get introduced to you and find out how we can work more effectively together. For example, as your updated site promises more and larger photos and related rich data, I wanted to see if we can help you accomplish this right away.

VisualTour is used by more than 100,000 Realtors coast-to-coast who created nearly 500,000 tours in 2008. The vast majority of these VisualTours are for resale listings, however some are community or neighborhood tours. These may be of interest to Yahoo!’s audience.

Additionally, with your current priority system in place for accepting bulk data uploads, most of the uploads you receive from a brokerage or franchise do not include a link to the virtual tour. We can provide you with tens of thousands more rich media virtual tours by simply matching up the unique listing data (MLS ID, zip code) from the feeds you receive from us and any of the various broker/franchise organizations.

I’d enjoy hearing more from you about your 2009 plans and how we can provide Yahoo! with additional value.

Best regards,

J. L. Winn
Vice President, Marketing & Business Development
web: http://www.VisualTour.com

Steve Schultz | December 10th, 2008 at 4:08 pm

@J.L. Winn – Thanks. I’ll get in touch with you offline.

Nordaune at Real Estate in Rochester MN | December 11th, 2008 at 10:06 am

Great Real Estate post … I found it very interesting.

Ed Gory | January 17th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

Can’t wait to understand how “meaty” personalization and sharing adds value to my clients.

Overland Park Real Estate | January 19th, 2009 at 9:28 am

Like the new look and the speed. Do all your Pru listings get fed with only 1 image or is that based on the franchisee preference?

Jacques Snyman | Website Design | April 5th, 2009 at 4:48 am

I like it a lot. Pity it is only available for the US. It would be nice to get this in South Africa, it might well be a great way to grow Yahoo’s userbase this side.

rent car malaga | August 11th, 2009 at 6:24 am

This kind of software is excellent for the industry. It helps agents hook up with customers more effectively and of course makes it so much easier for the customer! There are some really good innovations coming out in the world of online real estate.

عقار | August 19th, 2009 at 11:13 pm

yahoo Are the best in the software industry

oglasnik | September 11th, 2009 at 6:16 am

2009 prices are definitely more affordable but still not optimal for investors.
Thanks for the post

property prices | September 25th, 2009 at 12:41 am

This is a good blog.
Thanks.