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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TH who wrote (49339)	4/7/2006 12:46:42 AM
From: mishedlo	Respond to of 116555

A Path of Devastation globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mish

To: TH who wrote (49339)	4/7/2006 1:16:55 AM
From: mishedlo	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 116555

Is Google going to dominate the Real Estate industry. April 05, 2006 Google Real Estate: Time to Be a Portal House_1As Battelle and several IO readers have noted, Google has quietly launched a real-estate search service, which appears to be driven by Google Base. (Search for "real estate" in the main box and then narrow down the search). When the search is narrow enough, the results pages combine listings and annotated maps, which is nice. Once again, Google has taken a seemingly obvious and customer-friendly step that specialists like Homestore have failed to take for years. Google's service appears to be driven by Google Base (listings in a Connecticut area I know well were submitted by homesandland.com). As a result, at least in the area I searched, the service contains only a small fraction of the properties available. In other words, thus far, Google does not seem to be searching or scaping local real estate sites or the MLS listing services. Until it does so, it will not become a serious place to search for real estate, no matter how cool the interface is. Real estate search creates the opportunity to eventually generate billions of dollars of advertising, referral, and transaction revenue, from agents, mortgage brokers, movers, lawyers, and others. Real-estate is very much a local business, however, and until Google is able to present all of the listings in a given area, its real estate service will be yet another promising but under-developed sideline. Given the difficulty that Homestore, Yahoo, MSN and other companies have had assembling comprehensive national listings, building a good local real-estate search capability is probably not something that can be accomplished by waiting for local agents to enter data into Google Base. Rather, it will probably take a dedicated team of editors, salespeople, and engineers focused on building a dedicated real estate business. The bottom line is that, in real estate, as in many other categories (including Finance), Google has demonstrated that it has the right stuff necessary to take on and beat incumbents. It is doubtful, however, that it has enough right stuff to beat incumbents while pretending that this is the last thing it wants to do. Both Google Finance and Google Real Estate would benefit from having an easy-to-find, easy-to-use section welcome page, like those found on Yahoo! Finance. Both would benefit from having links on Google's front page. Adding sections and links, of course, would force Google to publicly abandon the already ludicrous claim that it has no interest in becoming a portal. But it would be better for users and shareholders alike. internetoutsider.com