10 Questions For Yahoo! Real Estate
Dustin on 08 29, 2006
Today I got an email from Haley at Yahoo announcing their new and improved real estate site:
Today Yahoo! Real Estate announced a revamped site which includes comprehensive tools and services to help home seekers chose their dream home. Yahoo! Real Estate is now more tightly integrated with Yahoo! Search and Local, giving users inside information (like mortgages, local market rates, even ratings and reviews on local restaurants, businesses and schools) for the more than 3 million homes listed on the site.
Below you’ll find a release detailing the improvements. If you’re interested in learning more, I’d be happy to arrange an interview with a Yahoo! Real Estate spokesperson, please feel free to email or call me on XXX.XXX.XXXX.
It is really not appropriate for me to do the interview, so I’d rather turn this back on RCG readers… Are there any questions you have for Yahoo about their new site?
If you do have questions, let me know ASAP because I’d like to aggregate the 10 best questions and pass them along to Haley by the end of the day today!
About the Author: Dustin Luther
- Author's website: http://www.raincityguide.com/
- More posts by Dustin
- email the author
24 Responses to “10 Questions For Yahoo! Real Estate”
Leave a Reply
Live Comment Preview
Popular Posts
Recent Posts
Recent Comments
- ARDELL: Roger, The majori
- ARDELL: Shawn, The only p
- Shawn: Thanks Ardell. This
- When will housing prices recover? A national look. | Rain City Guide: ... post is partly a
- ARDELL: Shawn, The credit
Hey Dustin,
Thanks for the opportunity to pose a question on Yahoo real estate. being based in London, we were wondering if they had any plans for international coverage or any plans for coverage outside the US
I’m a big believer in RSS. Any plans for adding RSS based real estate searches in the future? I’d also like to see RSS feeds for mortgage rate information.
Ohh… Two great questions so far… I like it!
Howcome when buyers do a search on Yahoo for properties for sale in the Ny area – only information for Prudential comes up? All the listings that are feed from the MLS have Prudential phone numbers, except for this tiny, tiny mention some where on the listing of the real listing broker. Yahoo looks like a Prudential site -
When I tried to see one of the inside photos in larger size, it wanted me to fill out some mega form just to see the kitchen. I left.
Yeah, I noticed my url went from yahoo.com to a prudential.com domain when I was looking around for Redmond home. I wasn’t sure if the Yahoo branded prudential.com site is considered part of Yahoo real estate or not.
Robbie,
The short answer is that Prudential runs the backend of Yahoo’s real estate site when you are searching for MLS data. It is definitely an interesting relationship… I wonder if there is a good question around this relationship…
I used to work at prudential, and yes, prudential and yahoo have a partnership.
The leads from yahoo, go to a live service at prudential, which in turn get sold referred to prudential agents at around 25-30% referrel fee
It makes interesting reltaionship, yahoo, zillow, prudential…
do you think prudential really wanted zillow comps integrated into prudential listings? I don’t think so..
Matt,
Interestingly, as Joel pointed out recently, Prudential California is already displaying zestimates on their site! Lots and lots of strange relationships being formed…
What cracks me up is that the same agents who will pay 25% to 30% to the company for a buyer lead and promote “Send me your referrals and I will GLADLY pay you a 25% referral fee!”, are the same ones who get “offended” when a buyer wants to negotiate a fee.
Oh so many questions….
I’d like to see who they consider their biggest competition/threat. Is it the other mainstream portals (Microsoft, Google), the new players (Trulia) or is it the brokers themselves, many of whom are integrated web searches into their own site.
Also do they have any plans to include RE blogs in with their RE headlines?
Some great questions! Here are the five I have so far…
1) Do you have any plans to go international?
2) Do you have any plans for adding RSS based real estate searches in the future? How about an RSS feeds for mortgage rate information?
3) What can you tell us about the relationship between Yahoo and Prudential?
4) Who do you see as your biggest competition/threat? Mainstream portals (Microsoft, Google), the new players (Trulia) or is it the brokers themselves, many of whom are integrated web searches into their own site?
5) Do you have any plans to include real estate blogs in your real estate headlines?
How can a non-prudential Realtor use this resource to promote their personal brand or listings (assuming the listing is not being shown through an IDX feed from Prudential)?
Do they plan to grow their real estate offerings outside of REALTORS? i.e.; builders or FSBO’s?
What are the requirements Brokers or MLS’ must meet to be included in Yahoo results?
Three more really good questions… (time’s running out to get your questions in!)
6) Can a non-prudential Realtor use this resource to promote their personal brand or listings?
7) If so, what are the requirements Brokers or MLS’ must meet to be included in Yahoo results?
Brad, I’m going to leave your first question off off, because they’ve already provided the answer through their actions! and the answer is yes!
Under “listing type” they list five categories:
Is it just me? Or do all these real estate search products seem the same? Where’s the innovation here? It seems to be a ‘gotta do it ’cause everyone else is’. When the market slows down/swans/flattens, and real estate is no longer the water cooler obsession du jour, will Yahoo’s offering and others simply fade away?
Eric,
These online tools are used more by buyers than sellers. When the market turns from a sellers market to a buyers market, these sites will be even more in demand than ever before. Those creating them now are ahead of their time.
If the market turns down to the point of everything on market being “a bargain”, even Redfin will become a valid option for many
Eric,
What would you consider innovative? Is Zearch innovative? The new Yahoo site is OK, but I think Trulia and Real Tech’s sites are better.
With all the leads from Yaoo going to Prudential agents, and Yahoo not having all listings from all brokers, it doesn’t seem like there is a lot fo integrity behind what they are doing. They are not offering information to help the consumer- they are just looking for money.
Everything Yahoo does is about leveraging relationships for money- turning everything they possibly can into a profit center. They don’t brand it as a Prudential- driven search or give any disclaimers around the fact that it is designed to drive leads to Prudential, which is deceitful as they try to get other brokers to put their listings on their site…
I do have questions, but I’m not sure they shuold be asked out loud, so I waited for more civilized things to accrue.
So:
1. How much more of a spanking does Realtor.com need? I particularly liked the nearby-amenities mapping.
2. Will Zillow.com go for the threesome? The piece of the pie Prudential brings to the table, nation-wide IDX data, is far more valuable than the Tax Assessor crud Zillow works with now. Not only are they one set of signatures away from a Realty.Bot category killer, they might give the DOJ someone else to fixate on! Wouldn’t that be fun?
Ha! Now there’s a thought!
The nearby amenities mapping is mighty cool – something that my clients always ask for.
Questions have been sent… I’ll obviously post a response from Yahoo when (and if) I get one.
No Greg, I didn’t include yours since they seem to have nothing to do with Yahoo!!! (But they did make me chuckle as well…)
> The nearby amenities mapping is mighty cool – something that my clients always ask for.
Yeah… There is an incredible IDX opportunity just lying around waiting for someone to pick up on it.
> No Greg, I didn’t include yours since they seem to have nothing to do with Yahoo!!!
That’s why I waited, to let the serious students go first.
[...] Yahoo Responds to Our Questions! September 1, 2006 Based on my request for questions a few days ago, I put together a slew of questions for Yahoo to answer about their new real estate site. I must say that I was a little bit disappointed in the number of times they state “we can’t comment on future releases or upgrades”, but otherwise, I think there are some nuggets of gold in their answers! (Note that I also added a few questions in the beginning to get them talking about their service before I hit them with the agent-specific stuff. ) [...]