The Truth about Real Estate Search - Where did that come from?

A lot of people have asked or commented about the white paper “The Truth about Real Estate Search” we released some time ago. Where did that come from? Who wrote it? Why did you publish it?

Well, to be very specific, it was one late night at a Manhattan hotel room (that in a true startup spirit didn’t even have a shower or bathroom in it) when it was all conceived in brief a moment of inspiration. We had discussed about the topic for a while, though. After the real estate industry press started mentioning search and our very own “vertical search” more and more often, we quickly noticed that apples, oranges and even prunes were sometimes happily mixed in a single bowl. Not bad for a delicious dessert, but we thought it might be helpful for the industry to clarify the search landscape and explain what the vertical search is, how the industry can benefit from it while avoiding the potential pitfalls. As we all know, new and change is often scary, so we wanted to give people to information to “judge for yourself”. And the baby, whitepaper about real estate search, was born.

In a true white paper spirit, we wanted to give as unbiased view of the search business as possible, not to promote Trulia, but to share our thoughts with the entire industry. Our basic premise is that vertical specific search - as opposed to generic or horizontal search like MSN/Yahoo!/Google - is nothing new when looking at the other verticals (such as jobs and consumer goods) and that consumers want a more structured way to search for information. You can see this by reading some of the many articles that have been written about vertical search to date. Vertical search offers consumers an application and interface that is superior to the generic search engines when it comes to a particular problem, such as researching real estate. If consumers want and need it, well, there is something in it!
From advertisers’ perspective vertical search is like choosing media between FOX and a more “vertical” OLN (Outdoor Life Network; personally I highly recommend it!) or New York Times and more “vertical” the Wall Street Journal. Besides the better ad targeting opportunity through more qualified buyers and sellers, we also concluded that real estate brokers and their web sites can benefit from vertical search engine’s nationwide economies of scale in Search Engine Marketing & Optimization, as well as from the strategically safe and sound listing advertising environment. One of these strategic benefits is the fact that a true search engine - unlike a traditional portal - is focused on sending the traffic back to the broker web site and not keeping the consumers at the portal.
On the flip side, we identified a number of challenges that brokers should keep in mind when allowing third parties to access one of their most valuable assets, property listings. Scraping, information errors, clear copyright infringements are among the potential issues brokers should be aware of.
But can you pick up the apples (personal bias!) from the fruit salad and leave the prunes? Yes you can .. and that was actually the final recommendation of the paper. It is easy to selectively protect your web site data and work with select (vertical) search engines to maximize the upside and avoid most of the downside. For technical people this is no news, but surprisingly many people still think you can only stop unlawful web site access through legal action.

If this piqued your interest, you should probably read it, even if you like mixed fruit salads. And if you have any ideas for other white papers or questions about this one, feel free to get in touch with us! Whenever we can, we’ll try to share our experiences and vision of the future to make it easier for you to navigate the world of online search.