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Google Adds Local Real Estate Listings

Posted on: Thursday, 6 April 2006, 21:00 CDT

By Kimberly Blanton, The Boston Globe

Apr. 6--Google Inc., the nation's most popular Internet search engine, has added real estate listings to its local mapping service.

Visitors to google.com who search for the terms "apartment rental" or "homes for sale" are asked to type in a location. Results are then displayed with red push pins on a Google map.

While the listings are far from comprehensive, Google is making its foray into the midst of a real estate information explosion and strong competition for the attention of home buyers and sellers.

Agents, multiple listing services, newspapers, and a proliferation of new sites, from Homepages.com to Zillow.com, are popping up on the Internet with increasingly detailed information, pictures and virtual tours about homes for sale.

Google, which competes with Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo.com, is seeking ways to attract and retain users -- and, in turn, advertisers -- to justify its sky-high stock price, said Mark Lanyon, an equity analyst at Morningstar, a Chicago investment research firm. Since September 2004, Google's stock price has quadrupled. It closed yesterday at $407.99.

Google denied yesterday that it intends to become a real estate listing service. The home and apartment listings are part of a new service, Google Base, designed to beef up the content resulting from Google searches. Google Base was rolled out in November.

Tony Longo, the founder of Condodomain.com, which carries listings of Boston's most luxurious condominium projects, said his firm submits listings on behalf of clients to Google, which he said quietly rolled out the service weeks ago. Google, like Trulio.com, Propsmart.com, and his site, is a "vertical search" provider that compiles listings from various sources.

MLS Property Information Network, the largest listing service in the Boston area, said Google has not approached MLS to provide content for the site.

So far, Google appears to have very few listings. In a search of properties for sale near the 02145 area code in Somerville, for example, Google generated fewer than a dozen listings, many of them not operational.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Boston Globe

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Source: The Boston Globe

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