Just because your bank account might be light is no reason to cancel your vacation this year. There are alternatives to expensive hotels. Expensive summer home rentals. Actually, renting someone’s vacation home for two to three weeks is usually cheaper than a fancy hotel and you get a lot more room to spread out. But finding a vacation home to rent out can be a real chore. Sites like VRBO.com have great inventory, but they are not easy to navigate or search. You have to know the exact town you want to stay in because there is no way to search listings on a map.
Enter Hotpads, the real estate site that is all about maps. It just added a “vacation” tab to its site, which lets you search for 20,000 vacation home rentals across the U.S. Results are plotted on a map, which is really convenient when you want to know how far away from the beach or the ski slopes the property is. Results can also be sorted by price and availability, which show up when you mouse over any given house icon. For instance, here is a search for Lake Tahoe vacation homes on HotPads (screenshot above), and here is what you get on VRBO (below). It is just alist of towns. Not very helpful, especially if you are traveling to somewhere you are not familiar with.
I don’t know why all real estate sites don’t just default to a map interface for search results. Sometimes it is an option, but usually you just get a mind-numbing list you have to scroll through. Homeaway, the Austin company which owns VRBO and several other vacation rental sites, should think about adopting a map interface across all of its sites. It has much more inventory—124,000 vacation homes—but they are so hard to find. For a company which raised $250 million last November, you’d think it could do better than that.
I have to respectfully disagree, Erick. If Homeaway or VRBO were to make a map search the default…you would see marker on top of marker on top of marker – with many property markers buried and “unclickable”…the map UI is not very user friendly when a website has a very large inventory.
I do agree that there is a better way – I just don’t believe a google map is that way. Not for these large sites.
Enjoyed the article. It does seem like the HotPads people are rethinking rentals from scratch, uninfluenced by other sites, which makes their site original and refreshing.
@David G: sounds like they just need more creative UI/UX people.
Agree. Here’s a free tip for any real estate website: use the Google Streetview API.
Yep, if your are tight on the budget you can still look at the inventory.
Hotpads is a joke. I’ve tried using their site few months ago and it was real buggy and slow to respond. I understand that their site is heavily focused on maps/flash but i was disappointed with their application.
I’ve looked for vacation rentals in the past, and the lack of maps always drove me nuts. I just tried Hotpads, though, and the inventory in the vacation space is laughable in the bay area. They suffer from the same problem as VRBO, in that they don’t screen what qualifies as a vacation home. There’s a difference between wanting a place to be home base for a trip to a region (SF, wine country, whatever), and wanting a place to BE the vacation. An isolated place where two kid-beleaguered adults can get away for a weekend.
Erik – I would agree with you: as a vacation rental guest, I’d like the ability to search by location using maps, much like I can do with hotels. However, the problem isn’t as simple as it seems at first glance.
Vacation rentals are generally individually owned. Therefore it’s up to owners or professional vacation rental firms to:
1. provide an address in the first place and
2. ensure it’s accuracy with Google Maps, Mapquest, etc.
Many folks don’t want their vacation rental home’s address listed at all due to theft concerns, etc. In addition, most of the mapping that occurs in resort markets isn’t accurate. Homeowners or managers have to actively work at correcting their home’s location
Escapia, like our partner HotPads, is working hard at making it easier for consumers to find and book vacation rentals online and that includes mapping.
Bryan Boice
National Sales Manager
Escapia, Inc.
What is hotpads paying to get this coverage on TechCrunch?
Really? Do you post this in every article on a company?
The issue with plotting vacation rentals on a map is that many of the owners of rentals, or the companies that manage them, do not provide address information. They claim its to protect against burglaries when the houses are vacant, but I have a feeling it has more to do with maintaining tight control over the inventory.
I have seen a few Vacation Rental sites, but this new one (http://www.ravant.com) is taking strides in the vacation rental arena.
The new website provides developers and/or geeky web html freaks with added features, too, and on their blog they show off the add-ins, or widgets, which one can take and display on their own pages. That includes a slideshow, which is a nice feature for a developer, and saves them the time creating one themselves. Also, an easy upload to craigslist, a must for someone trying to get their listing out there. And, maps, of course.
Nice site – but I will definitely check out this HotPads one, too, for the integrated map search.
For a fairly new site, Ravant definitely seems promising, in more of a geeky tech way, which could be a good thing, yaknow.
Thanks!
Are you f’ing kidding? Yeah.. no.. you definitely don’t run that site.. just a rabbid fan of the 1995 style html and awful design.
Get out of here with the crap.
Geeky web html freaks… jesus.
@Dude,
No need to use any harsh and inappropriate language. I don’t run the site, and I am no fan of the design of that site, no.
However, I do believe that their widgets are indeed useful and are quite promising – something that HomeAway could probably learn from.
“Geeky web html freaks” – ok, I take that term back.
Thanks EC for the kind words.
Hopefully our developer widgets don’t come across as too ‘geeky.’ After all, we’re hoping that many of our owners would find it easy to simply drop our vacation rental widgets to their websites.
We’ve still got some more widgets we’re developing now, such as an embedded availability calendar.
Daniel
Ravant vacation rentals, co-founder
Real estate and long term apartment rental websites benefit from being predominately map-driven because the prospective buyer will usually have an intimate understanding of the area, so exact location is of great importance… for example to trace their new commute to work.
Vacation rental seekers however inquire into holiday destinations that are relatively foreign to them. A map may be useful to see how close the house lies to a body of water, but that’s about it.
For vacation rentals, I would prioritize the most important features as being 1) clear easy pricing 2) ability to quickly and easily compare pricing with other rental units 3) sophisticated search queries such as how many beds, bedrooms, swimming pool? Jacuzzi? etc.. 4) high quality pictures of the interior and exterior of the rental unit… I would even put availability calendars ahead of maps.
Well said. Maps are a “nice to have” feature but not critical for vacation rentals.
One thing nobody is mentioning is RECOMMENDATIONS. Feedback from users easily trumps all of the features for any consumer looking for a vacation rental.
RE Marketer, there are several sites that have recommendations now: Check out http://www.FlipKey.com (owned by Trip Advisor). HomeAway also has reviews and I think Escapia is trying to do reviews.
There are also some luxury players that vet each home and have reviews such as http://VillasofDistinction.com, http://TheSociety.com and Roberts Villa List.
I would have to disagree that maps should be the default for any real estate search. Maps are often used as a crutch for poor interface design and in a lot of cases should support the underlying information. Having a list of vacation rentals with a supporting map would be a better way to go. With Hotpads you have to click on each property before getting a lot of the relevant information. A list with supporting map can display the information in a far more usable format.
You will also save a lot of money by being able to cook your own meals instead of going to a restaurant for three meals a day.
I sort of like how they’re experimenting with this vertical by using their current technology. I do agree that recommendations and feedback from users is a must feature these days.
I like maps, but consumers are looking for huge deals. In many cases, homeowners are offering last minute price cuts. A new marketplace for this is http://www.next...ekvacations.com. Last minute vacation rentals and only last minute vacation rentals.
Flash maps = bad SEO
I’ve used vrbo quite a few times and in my experience they have that largest inventory, which in my opinion is the most important “feature.” I do actually think an interactive map feature is incredibly useful, as most of the places where I tent to rent vacations homes are somewhat local and I know the area (tahoe, mendocino, etc.), so being able to see the location on a map is very useful.
One thing that hotpads seems to really lack, besides inventory (where does their inventory come fry btw?), is useful list features. Their sorting criteria in the list mode is pretty lame. Price per sq. ft. for a vacation home, is that really important? How about number of bedrooms, price, etc.? And no filters, such as pets, wheel chair accessible, etc.
Vrbo’s site is certainly cumbersome with it’s enormous list of cities, listings, etc., buy at least they have some sorting features and some icons that tell you info (e.g. allow pets) in a list view. I think if hotpads combined a nice list with the map side-by-side, added some decent sorting features and filters, and could federate their inventory across popular sites like vrbo, then we’d be talking!
BTW, one nice thing about vrbo’s cumbersome and vast interface is that it decreases rental demand perhaps resulting in lower cost rental homes? Just a thought…
Love their maps. Best of luck to hotpads.
Applaud Hotpads for using maps nicely.
For real estate search, map interface for both search and browsing is certainly important, in addition to a large inventory of listings. In fact, a map interface and a large inventory probably go hand in hand to explore what’s out there in the real world.
I am working at Cazoodle, where we building a very comprehensive crawl-based “organic” apartment search and, yes, map is *the* interface. We also integrate with Google Streetview to let users better explore the neighborhood. Try it and let me how you think: http://apartmen...s.cazoodle.com/.
Search into the real world just go naturally with maps!
kevin chang
I like all vacation home rental sites because vacationing in hotels is hard work. Maps is a great feature but exposure, navigation and site features are the key. A small company that is on the right track…
reservemyhome.com
Travel on!
Furnished Homes – Vacation Rentals by Map
Furnishedhomes.com interactive google maps mashup site. It is very challenging to build a maps based vacation rental site. Anyone can throw up a vacation home directory overnight. The reason you do not see many, if not really any, truly interactive map sites for vrbo’s is that it is very hard to develop. Not a project for the weak hearted. Furnished Homes is making headway in map based site.