Just when you thought the real-estate bubble had burst and the economy was going to hell, here comes another real-estate search engine. Today we see the launch of Roost, a real-estate site inspired by the lean look and feel of travel search engine Kayak. In fact, two of Roost’s board members and lead investors from General Catalyst Partners are also on the board of Kayak. Roost was founded in May 2007, and raised a $5.5 million A round.
What makes Roost different is that, instead of trying to list all properties in the U.S. as Zillow or CyberHomes do, or take in feeds from individual real estate brokers as Trulia does, it is negotiating with Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) in each metro area to get a comprehensive set of houses on sale. Redfin also taps into the MLS. (The MLS is what real-estate brokers contributeto and use to find homes on the market, and up until recently MLS data was well-guarded from the Web). Roost launches with more than a dozen cities/MLSs, including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. (Notably absent are San Francisco and New York).
Roost is a real-estate search engine with comprehensive for-sale listings in the markets it covers, including for-sale-by-owner listings (which it does not show side-by-side with MLS listings because of industry restrictions). You can see all the photos for a particular house without leaving the search engine, you can see results on a map, and there are sliders (for price, bedrooms, square feet, etc.) to tweak results. It is a pretty-straight-forward site without a lot of bells and whistles. “We are laser focused on search,” CEO Alex Chang tells me. “We are not doing valuations. We are not creating heat maps. We are doing high-performance search.”
On the back-end, Roost hosts a directory of real-estate broker sites and delivers search traffic to those sites based on a combination of natural results and paid search. “I send qualified traffic to the broker,” says Chang. “They are buying clicks from me.” That is the business model. But Chang is going to have to crow pretty loud to get noticed by prospective home-buyers who have many other real-estate search engines to choose from these days, and maybe less incentive to go house-hunting in the first place.
which one is the best ?
Just a head’s up that Redfin is a brokerage… so like, Roost, they get full MLS listings for the markets they cover.
The site is not working at the moment and no data seems to be on the site. Launched a bit early??
The best, in my opinion, is Movoto: http://www.movoto.com
Try it!
is the timing for their launch a good one ?! don’t think so..
what about canadial mls ? looks like the site to tie in the rest of the continents will bring in more sales.
Google will end up buying them all
It’s so refreshing and enlightening to see a clutter-free search service as such. I wish others would take notice. I’m looking at you Technorati…
Cheers,
Aidan
http://www.MappingTheWeb.com
Real estate market is never dead.
http://tekno-wo...ld.blogspot.com
This is a stupid idea IMHO
Real estate is not like web data, where everything is just out there with no real way to track it down. When you search for a house 9 times out of 10 you have some idea in what location you want to live, there are 100’s of broker sites in that area where you can search the MLS for free. I just don’t see where the added value is. How is this any different than the website of a major national broker such as Centry 21 or zip realty? Zip Realty has an awesome website if anyone has yet to check it out.
Roost will be deadpooled in 6 months (or less).
The MLS is publicly available at realtor.com. It hasn’t been the “holy grail” for at least 5 years.
As with Trulia’s push into private-label real estate search on major media web sites, Roost’s strategy of offering branded IDX search to brokerages is a way around the problem of attracting traffic. The Roost.com site may not score all that well on national hit-counters, but if they can draw people in one small private-label site at a time, they can get the traffic they need to make money. At the least, it’s refreshing to see a business plan that isn’t based on advertising.
I have been trying to search in Chicago. The site is extremely slow and keeps freezing, the controls are not that good.
Once I did get the results I want, you can’t see detail on any of the properties! I don’t know why they don’t have information on the properties at all, that should be pulled from MLS.
There is a link to the property on the broker’s website, and none of them work, it always comes back with a page not found error!
Seems like they should have stayed in Beta longer.
My techie son sent me this link. As a Realtor, I agree with alot that was written. I’m in the Dallas area, real estate is alive and well. However, there are so many search engines out there now. What makes them think theirs will be bigger or better? In my opinion, it is one more “pay per click” website. My company, Keller Williams Realty, is partnered with 9 search engines that are free to us. I pay for Realtor. com to have photos show up on my listings. That is where most of my online business comes. I have paid for other websites that promised to send me traffic. After the cost, it barely paid for itself. Lesson learned. Stick to what works!
As someone who is in the market now I was floored by how great it is to search on this site – especially in comparison to other sites out there. It is really intuitive to use and the results came back incredibly fast and the data is far more complete than most sites out there.
There may be other real estate sites out there – but if there can be multiple travel sites – Kayak, Orbitz, Sidestep, Travelocity – to name a few – - multiple ticket sites – TicketMaster, StubHub, RazorGator, TicketsNow why can’t there be multiple successful real estate?
“Nothing found” for my city. PHOENIX.
LOL, they have their pin for Atlanta plugged somewhere deep in southern Georgia.
Incase you’re worried about buying right now, renting is always a good option to ride it out.
We’re working hard to provide the best rental search site:
http://www.rentalsource.com
How come you guys haven’t covered Movoto (www.movoto.com) among the other RE sites? It’s a really great site.
I use it daily and the email notifications about new property listings in the Bay Area. The information is comprehensive since they compile the data from multiple MLS and governmental sources. It is really great for understanding the details of each property.
It takes a while to load a search for me. Maybe because it is still in Beta. But I totally agree with what you said in the last paragraph.
+1 on Albert’s question about Canada. You ‘mericans get all the cool Web 2.0 real estate sites, and we’re stuck up here with plain ol’ MLS.ca.
Huh…I always thought the abbreviation for Virginia was VA
They are tapping directly into local MLS for listing data but from a consumer point of view still nothing really new. The are a few issue’s I see. One is with trying to gain traction with the site. The current structure is not “organically” search friendly so free organic SE traffic maybe difficult. This problem is compounded to IDX rules to display all listings they need to make use the sub-domains for each idx they receive (hence the companyname.idx.roost.com/ urls) which makes deep linking difficult. This leads me to think means they will need to build buzz or do click arbitrage to generate serious traffic which will burn capital quickly. With the CPC model some of the brokers who provide the feeds maybe better at just doing the CPC themselves.
Lastly, the Brokers and MLS’s providing the data may receive opposition from their agents and dues paying members for syndicating listings to a site where FSBO properties are available on the same search platform. If they have enough pressure from those that pay the bills they will pull the feeds leaving an empty roost.
Tried this site, very slow, and seems to me the agent website linking to each listings is not really the listing agent website. is that ok to do that?
They have long way to go comparing with http://www.movoto.com or http://www.redfin.com.
Hey Retrove – you probably need to fix the ‘About Real Estate’ link on your site before talking about empty Roost and such things. I gave your crazy idea a try, but you don’t have it together. Also, how about a zip code search rather than selecting state from pulldown menu. what is this, 1998?
I take that back, RETROVE. My mistake. RETrove links all work. It works great. Impressive. Sorry for trying to punk you a second ago.
@befreeninstan – no worries. State drop down is to increase speed in filtering nearly 11 million records for real estate listings.
We have “ajax” autosuggest for both City & Zip but as a consumer if you are relocation across town / country you probably don’t know the zip yet.
The idea is total transparency in real estate search – taking you directly to the actual listing sources.
Another startup out to change the real estate world – why don’t their venture capital firms ever learn?
Great God! $5.5 milliion so this guy can attract advertisers based on click counts. Wake up folks the MLS is free to you and has been for quite some time.
In example for San Francisco…sfarmls.com….and yes, no one is selling you anything but real estate!
are they both operating in India also.
Real estate is the most biggest in property!
@michael #28 – problem is that most consumers don’t know how to find access to the local public access MLS. Additionally, many of the 800 or so MLS around the country don’t provide public access like the sfarmls.com – as an example San Diego’s Sandicor provides no public access.
Lastly, by searching only the MLS most consumers will not see approximately 20% of available listings, which are marketed, as FSBO at anyone time via newspaper classifieds, FSBO sites and craigslist, etc.
quiblok.com
You need to check this site out soon.
I agree with Bokon Too Koonet. What Roost is doing is not a new idea – online real estate companies have been stitching MLS IDX sites together for years. What’s unique about the new crop of Web 2.0 sites is not only in the experience, but in the direct data licensing from the brokers and MLSs (like the parent company of http://www.Cyberhomes.com – Fidelity National – is the largest provider of MLS services and has direct access to the MLS data all day long to aggregate for Cyberhomes.)
This would be a pre-announcement of our launch. Please go to Quiblok.com site and register at the blog for lauch announcement http://www/quiblok.com/blog
This would be a pre-announcement of our launch. Please go to Quiblok.com site and register at the blog for lauch announcement http://www.quiblok.com/blog
Roost.com is a good addition to the crowded national field of websites that aggregate. Their product is far superior to most of them including the realtor’s worst enemy, Realtor.com. Consumers will like the simplicity of the layout. We are partnering with Roost in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and their staff are a pleasure to work with.
David Winans GMAC Real Estate
http://www.TexasMLS.com/
Dreamtown Realtors sponsors the MLS Search , http://www.best...hicago-mls.html on our site.
They’re the standard of excellence for property searches in Chicago.
Bob
Hey Bob, can you clarify what you mean when you say that Dreamtown.com sponsors the MLS search? Aren’t they just copying the same format as all the other’s? What makes them the “standard for excellence” for property searches? Is it thier search engine model…it seems like they are all the same, i’m a newbie in the real-estate game and a little confused. How does it all work?
Thanks,
Joey
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The real estate market will recover faster than Wall Street.
A business associate of mine spends about 6 hours blogging and using web 2.0 to generate real etate leads. If you are in real estate… you have to find new ways to use social networking sites. It’s a must to use sites like Roost. http://www.ibuymorehomes.com
Why go to a big national site where there is yet another step between the buyer and the realtor who ultimately will be the one person to help the person through the transaction?
Try searching locally, there’s much better alternatives like mine:
http://www.dall...familyhomes.com
I Agree With Dallas Home, You Can search local sites which i think are much better to search for homes on.
try http://www.nuhomesource.com
Looks like a really handy website, and I am definitely going to send it over to my clients. I handle real estate matters myself.
http://www.ideastolegacies.com
I like this one http://www.movoto.com