Google for homes, not just homepages
Google made a breakthrough real estate announcement on the google blog yesterday while I was busy writing about Google's announcement of their new data center in the Charleston area.
As the leading search engine, Google wants to make it easier to search for your dream home online so they have added an important feature to their search results, a prompt for you "to enter a location and choose whether you want to buy or rent. After clicking "Go," you can see the individual homes that Google has indexed, provided by our partners and culled from the web. When you want more information on a particular home, you can click straight through to the source of the listing—no detail pages or sign-up forms get in the way." Please read Homes, not just homepages.
There have been a lot of websites set up for real estate search in the past few years and technology is dramatically changing the real estate industry. Google will be the place where real estate search changes forever and I'm actually surprised it took this long for them to get involved but maybe they just wanted to do it right, which is Google's way of doing things. Unlike others, Google promises no disintermediation, rather "Our business is helping people find the information they're looking for."
A few months ago, the Houston Association of Realtors (HAR) and Google announced a joint venture, it was Google's first step into real estate and Houston was the first MLS in the country to make their listings truly "public". Interestingly, Gettys Glaze, my broker at Sandlapper Real Estate Group, was the Charleston representative at the National MLS conference in Florida last week discussing the future of real estate and the MLS system. The Houston MLS was a key subject of discussion.
As I did a search for the coveted search term, Charleston real estate, I was pleased by position number 4 on the first page of Google for my website (of course, 1 would be a little nicer) and noticed the new search box for the first time. Many more buyers will be noticing it in the days to come.
There are many real estate agents who fear a future when empowered buyers have access to information potentially rendering them irrelevant. As I have pointed out repeatedly, it is a pleasure to work with empowered buyers and a real estate agent in the future will be required to add value to the transaction in order to earn a commission for services provided. The future is now.