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Search Engines Pitch Real Estate

Posted on: Monday, 16 July 2007, 21:15 CDT

Even during a time when far fewer homes are selling -- the Bay Area total is down about 15 percent compared with last year's already slow season -- plenty of people are interested in researching real estate. That could mean checking out what's for sale in the neighborhood, obsessively tracking of the value of one's own home, checking mortgage rates or learning about investing in foreclosures.

An enormous number of sites dish up such real estate information online. But even if you already do your searching or get your e-mail at Yahoo or Google, the two Silicon Valley-based search engine giants, you might not realize that you can find real estate listings without leaving either search portal.

Yahoo Real Estate (http://realestate.yahoo.com) has devoted a lot of time, energy and no doubt money to offer real estate services that range from for-sale and for-rent listings to user-posted real estate classified ads, to home valuations to school reports with test scores. According to ComScore statistics from May, it was the second most popular real estate site online; Hitwise, another rating service, ranked it sixth most visited in June.

Yahoo's next push will be to add to the local neighborhood information it features, said Michael Yang, general manager of Yahoo Real Estate.

Up until this year, he said, "So much of online real estate has been getting the basics," things such as listings and comparable home sales. But Yahoo and others are seeking ways to give consumers more pertinent local information, and even places to discuss it online. "That's where the future of online real estate is," Yang said.

In the real estate arena, Yahoo offers far more services than Google does. Google has made no high-profile efforts to lure real estate oriented visitors. But for the past couple of years the company has "quietly been building up a database" of real estate listings, said Google Maps and Earth director John Hanke last week, by forging partnerships with large brokerages and multiple listing services, and by crawling the Web looking for listings data.

Last week, however, it made a move to woo house-hunters and apartment seekers by introducing a feature that makes it easy to create a custom Google map marked with real estate listings from Google Base, an advertising site with the listings database.

Despite the slower market, one thing's certain to endure: Bay Area residents' obsession with real estate. And these two Silicon Valley search portals are positioning themselves to take advantage of that fascination.

External sites: --Yahoo Real Estate --Google Maps

Source: San Jose Mercury News

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