Nerve Endings Firing Away

The real estate market isn’t usually the target of most web companies. Sure, we have had online services like Zillow that let you look up property valuations laid out on maps and Criagslist has a healthy listing of property listings. Effectively, these services try and cut out the middle man who usually makes a lot of commission based on the information asymmetry in the real estate market. Consumers in this market are the least likely to make the best decision while buying or even renting a house even though this might be the biggest [monetary] decision they might make in their life.

Google had launched its own version of classifieds called Google Base but we haven’t heard much about it in recent times. Housing was just one of the sections in Google Base. But earlier this week, they integrated Google Base in their most popular product ever – Google Search. Not many people might be searching or listing their items on Google Base but Google Search is the first destination for most when they are looking for stuff even housing.

If you enter a city name followed by “real estate” in the Google Search box, you will see a option just above the first search result just like in the adjoined image. The Google Blog announced this on Thursday and while the listings aren’t available for all U.S. cities yet, they are rapidly adding cities. Almost all the major cities I looked for were available. It lets you specify a location and the listing type – rent, sale, foreclosure before you hit Go. Once you do, you are taken directly to the Google Base Housing section where you can fine tune your search according to a variety of factors that you use during house-hunting. See image below:

Don’t be thrown off by the first $15 million+ offering, you can sort it from low to high as well [you get something for $100 when you do]. You can sort your results by listing type, price, property type, bedrooms, bathroom, and of course, location. The search results are also plotted on an adjacent map. Brokers, Agents, MLSs, and IDX vendors can also add their property listings on Google Base so that they pop up on the search. Now, this is nothing new. There exists an independent mashup – Housing Maps – that uses listings on Craigslist and maps them on Google Maps. But of course, you can imagine who is going to get more traffic – this mashup or results in the Google Search Results page.

Google may thus be moving into Craigslist territory and leveraging its powerful search monopoly to direct traffic to its still-struggling applications like Google Base. Other listing sites may feel shortchanged and resent Google’s thrusting their product in their otherwise potential customers. This would be valid if there were any sponsored advertisements on the search results page but strangely, I don’t see any. Probably Google doesn’t sell ads for those search terms which is strange since it also would be a lucrative market. Does Google hope to earn much more through its Base listings than it would through contextual ads? Maybe time will tell.