I received this email from a Rain City Guide reader this morning:
Radcribs had to take down its NYC real estate mashup. Radcribs basically copied every bit of its code from Trulia (all the javascript, all the CSS for layouts, all the HTML templates, etc). Trulia’s lawyers made short work of that. You’ll see that Radcribs is back to just providing what is basically a ripoff of PropertyShark’s service. (PropertyShark actually had to file suit against Radcribs for copyright infringement to get Radcribs to back off.)
Like the top-notch investigative reporter that I am ;), I was able to confirm that Radcribs was stealing appeared to be copying code from Trulia from a very good source who I’ll leave anonymous.
Without a doubt, I’m going to take RadCribs (and CityCribs, which appears to be run by the same people) down from my list of Innovative real estate search tools since they don’t seem to be doing much innovation.
If I hear anything else interesting about this story, I’ll be sure to report it!
UPDATE: Based on some feedback from my source, I decided to tone down the assertion a bit since I may have been overzealous in my reporting…
Pingback: sellsius » Blog Archive » A Spider’s Web: Vertical Real Estate Search
Hello Dustin,
I am sorry to hear you have decieded to take CityCribs.com from your list of Innovative real estate search tools. We in no way are related to RadCribs.com in fact a complete seperate entity. An article was recently published at The Real Deal to clear this up, http://www.therealdeal.net/issues/FEBRUARY_2006/1138381093.php , I hope this might change your mind about pulling our site form your featured list. Please let me know if you have any questions or feedback about our community. We take great pride in our work and strive to grow a marketplace with intergrity and consumer freindly innovative functionality. Thank you for your time.
That’s an interesting article, but it definitely didn’t clear up the issue. I’ll review the email that made me think you guys were the same operation and then possible post an update to the list. I need to update the list, anyway, since Zillow is obviously not “vaporware” anymore! Best.