2009 revealed a lot of major events and technological breakthroughs for the Real Estate Industry, so we wanted to wrap up the year by highlighting some of the key players of the past 12 months. While there were many to chose from, we decided to focus on search functions since it’s such a huge part of what we do, but please feel free to comment with other events you deem important for our industry as well. As always, we welcome your thoughts!
February, 2009 – Duplicate Content Solutions: We started this year with Google pushing the duplicate content issues further into the limelight. Although the previous year instilled the idea of an SEO “violation” with duplicate content, the announcement in February of the canonical link system was the first significant attempt to allow the site owner to create a solution. For real estate and, more importantly, the Enterprise platform, companies can now designate which “copy” of property information is considered the original and should be treated as the index-friendly version.
April, 2009 – Zillow iPhone application: Zillow announced earlier this year that they now have a free iPhone application for their customers. Users can now search for homes while filtering by price, beds, bath, etc. They also have the ability to save their searches, get notified when new homes come on the market, and many more options – all while on the move. With so many iPhone applications out there, we really feel like Zillow had one of the best and worth noting. In our opinion, Zillow nailed it.
May, 2009 – Google as a Real Estate Search: In May, Google offered a Real Estate-specific search in their map search service. This data comes directly from Google Base, an outlet that we have been syndicating to for quite some time. The use of Google Base has led to search results in the “long tail” that hadn’t previously existed and the method of providing this data has completely bypassed the traditional system of optimization we use for content pages. (Normally, we would have to wait for a search bot/spider to visit the page, but this cuts out the middle man and provides just the pertinent information straight to the Google database.)
June, 2009 – Microsoft’s Bing: In June, Microsoft consolidated both its MSN and Live search engines with some major improvements (and a fantastic marketing campaign in the US). The most significant feature as it relates to Real Estate is the enhanced result page content. Unlike the information on a Google or Yahoo result pages, Bing provides the property description and details with a much higher level of accuracy. (Please note, randomly placing the word “stunning” or using all caps will not help us here or anywhere.)
July, 2009 – Sawbuck Realty announces partnership with local paper: Dallas newspaper company, A.H. Belo, joins forces with Sawbuck Realty by investing 2 million dollars into the real estate firm. The internet-based real estate brokerage firm joined Belo in hopes of increases content for the home listings section in The Dallas Morning News. Through the paper, customers will now have access to an extensive MLX database thus challenging other real estate companies in the area to now compete with the local paper.
October, 2009 – Google adds Real Estate to drop down search menu: This was another major move by Google and shows how much interest they have in the real estate space. Since Google added real estate listings to their mapping service earlier in the year and have been constantly working throughout the year updated the service to make things even easier for customers. Brokers need to be aware of these changes as well in order to better meet the needs of their clients.
November, 2009 – NAR Releases Realtors Property Resource (RPR): A wholly owned subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors, RPR will consist of 150 million properties making them a major source of public property information. With a plan to combine millions of property data records into one place, the database will be a resource for NAR members to add value for their customers.
November, 2009 – Google adds landing pages: Google has taken real estate searches to another level. Earlier in 2009, Google added the real estate overlay to Google Maps and now they are giving a page to every listing including property details, photos and more. This is essentially a listing details page that real estate companies offer on their websites.
December, 2009 – Coldwell Banker releases beta site: The beta launch of Coldwell Banker’s earlier this month included an interesting search platform. BlueScape allows customers who visit the site to view a variety of images in order to determine their ideal home. As the pictures flash across the screen, users click the “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button based off their personal preference. The result is a list of available homes around the country that match your likes. But, while we give kudos to Coldwell for trying something new, there is still a lot of needed improvement and we believe 2010 will bring major advancements in the area of lifestyle search.
As 2009 comes to a close, we are all very excited to see what is in store for us in 2010. It should prove to be a big year for the Real Estate Industry and the Enterprise Network is proud to be leading the way.
The second phase of the web is only increasing in sophistication, creativity and visual quality. One of the trends we are seeing is the mashup of content from multiple sources creating an integrated and seamless experience. The web user today expects more than just information. And when it comes to a search for real estate, people want to know more than just the price, location and number or bedrooms– they want their search to be visually stimulating and consider their lifestyle as well. 
