The economy is in the hole, and real estate is in an even deeper hole. What better time to invest in a real estate search engine? Shasta Ventures just led an $8 million series B financing in Roost, a real-estate search engine that is grabbing data from MLS listings (actually from something called the IDX, or Internet Data Exchange, which is a close proxy to MLS listings).
As a result, Roost claims to have more comprehensive and accurate listings in the cities it covers than competing real-estate search engines such as Trulia and Zillow. Roost offers 3.1 million listings in about 30 major metro areas.
Yet Roost’s traffic barely registers. It is much smaller than Trulia, Zillow, or Redfin (which I’ve charted as a comparison below because Redfin also is not yet nationwide). Roost was late to market, so it is a bit surprising that it was able to raise a second round in this environment. Direct access to the MLS listings is an advantage, but is it enough to get Roost over the hump?
Roost raised 5.5 million last January from General Catalyst Partners, the Cross Country Group and Geolo Capital. They all participated in the current round as well. Roost also just added foreclosure listings from First American CoreLogic, a pretty common feature on real-estate sites.
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definitely not as good as redfin, this round of funding is very suprising, maybe they have something up there sleeves
Doesn’t seem like something extraordinary. Most people will probably stick to realtor.com
doesn’t seem quite ready yet - i searched for hawaii and it gives me back only 5 results, which seem to all be in hawaii, except that roost says they’re in texas!
And..the site is down. Roost, you’ve been Techcrunch’d!
Seems strange for a company that doesn’t doesn’t provide their own IDX software platform. The smart money should be investing in the actual IDX software providers. Will be interesting to see the ROI on this one! Perhaps an IDX software company acquisition is on the horizon??
I don’t get it. Anybody who is a part of the Realtor association can get the information from the MLS through the IDX. That Roost website doesn’t seem like it’s doing much beyond retrieving the info and displaying it. The website is crawling right now, and I don’t know why I would go there rather than my local MLS website and Realtor.com for national search.
knowing this space very well….roost is making an endrun around the MLS and doing a very good job of it - market by market. With a great loss leader entry into a market - it is not unlikely they will have total coverage soon.
In most markets - the MLS has simply become an obstacle to overcome in getting IDX information online.
By aligning with brokers to get the initial datafeed - roost is able to offer full data coverage in all it’s markets.
Is it worth an 8 million dollar investment? If I were that smart I’d be running my own roost
Is wondering how well Facebook Connect works…
I really like Zillow they are doing a great job. Roost has good opportunity ahead to become the kayak of real estate.
At a time when the VC well has all but dried up, it’s rather puzzling as to why anyone would want to invest/dump $8 million into a ‘late show’ listing aggregation site that has comparably low traffic?
IDX allows real estate brokers and service providers the ability to post active listings and pictures which are then downloaded into a local database on the service provider’s server.
This is the service that the overwhelming majority of real estate brokers (and agents) use on their personal websites but also what your major real estate websites use to obtain listing data.
The newer version is a system called RETS (Real Estate Transaction Standard) and allows for more information but also requires more compact agreements in the way the data is displayed.
Most local MLS systems do not actively give out IDX feeds to people outside of brokers as this could create a direct competitor with Realtor.com, ran by the National Association of Realtors®.
That being said, I have to wonder if Roost is getting their feeds directly from local MLS’s or if they are hijacking feeds from other services (ie agent websites) via Realtor members.
Kayak of real estate is http://www.beatyouthere.com . I am a realtor in Florida and I have closed two deals because of beatyouthere. I heard they are are up for sale, but who cares, as long as i keep getting leads from whoever buys them.
I also heard that they were up for sale. They should do ok, because i don’t think they are in debt to their VC’,,,because they don’t have any.
good engine…
Erick, thanks for the post.
We’re obviously thrilled about the round as well as our new partnership with First American CoreLogic to offer Roost consumers the most comprehensive set of Foreclosures on the web.
I’d like to comment on our traffic since there has been a lot of entertaining chatter about it. As I explained to you via email, third party services have no way of measuring our traffic effectively because much of it happens across a wide set of domains.
Under the hood, Roost is really a search engine that sits on top of a network of individual hosted broker sites/domains. Spend some time searching an area like San Francisco and you’ll see this in the URL.
Rest assured our traffic across the Roost platform is significantly higher than what you’re seeing on any of the reporting services like GoogleTrends.
Alex Chang
CEO
Roost.com
I really like the site and service as a whole. I wish they had more coverage in the NJ and PA areas though.
Regards,
Andre from PA
http://www.selinsgroverealestate.com
Thick competition with Trulia, Zillow, etc. but Roost has one distinct advantage… completely different UI and fast (only one using AJAX). Much different experience browsing for listings.
At the end of the day, all these sites are going to have the same listings from the same data feeds. But who can deliver the best experience?
I’ve found that sometimes a good visual can make all the difference to a blog post, so I’m always sure to include at least one. They brighten the place up a little too.
Eric,
Real estate business can happen in good and bad markets, it’s just a matter of taking the right side.
Right now foreclosure, refinancing, and loan modification is a big business, so Roost can target its users for these offers.
When the market starts picking back up, they can start pushing new home sales, and the cycle continues. With this $8 million, I’d have to imagine the goal is to prove the business model when the economy is bad, so when things start turning around they’re in perfect shape.
I personally like to use http://www.viewmylisting.com for listings. Very easy to use, comprehensive, accurate, and FREE… They have so many listings. They too just released their office management software ProGoldi2.com software FREE, and they have a great agent tool that not only the agents can use for free, but buyers and sellers can use it too. It is really a must use!!!
I blog on Zillow and Trulia. I’m lookinf forward to trying out roost.