What’s that Beastie Boys lyric? Something like “Technology is wizardry, what you got is…” Anyway….we now have more real estate technology and listing search capability thanks to Roost.com, which apparently just launched its San Francisco listings.
Looks to us like they partnered with Zephyr Real Estate to get those listings (smart on Zephyr’s part), and from what we could tell there are quite a few listings available to browse, and you’ll even get email alerts for new matches. You can filter by map, price, bedrooms, bathrooms, area, and all kinds of stuff. It is pretty darn quick with spitting back results and is simple and straight forward. It is lacking the capability to search anything that is not “active”, but what do you expect? MLS owns the data, and they’re protecting it, and keeping Realtors (like us) employed. There are, however, other sources for enhanced search and alerts when properties you might be tracking change status, and you can even get sold stats from more and more real estate sites, so if you know where to look, you should be able to find everything you need online these days when searching for homes in San Francisco.
Your homework: try Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, SFARMLS, Clean Offer, sfnewsletter, Roost, and any others we’re forgetting and report back, which is the best.
–Enhanced Listing Search [Clean Offer]
–Sold Properties Reports [sfnewsletter]
So when will all these on-line real estate sites consolidate? There are so many of them and they all do pretty much the same things. With the RE market the way it is, I just am not sure there are enough ‘users’ or ‘traffic’ to support all of them.
I only use SFARMLS, RedFin, and PropertyShark. (And I think RedFin should change its logo to a submerged Shark’s Fin – a la ‘Jaws’ – and then merge with PropertyShark so there are less of these sites a consumer has to deal with).
Thanks for the post.
Yes, we are a bit “tongue-in-cheek” with our tagline. But, we are trying to make an important point. Consumers searching for homes for sale don’t understand that many of the real estate sites online today offer just a fraction of the homes for sale in any given market. Additionally, many – as many as half of the listings on popular real estate search engines are inaccurate or no longer for sale. We can’t continue to ask time starved consumers to sift through bad data. http://www.Roost.com just released a independent study conducted by the WAV Group with an analysis of the homes for sale content on popular real estate sites like Trulia, Zillow, Google, & Yahoo. It can be found on our blog: http://blog.roost.com/2008/08/26/accuracy-online-property-searches-examination/
I signed up for an account, but no confirmation email was sent. I tried to get another confirmation, but again none was sent. I checked my junk/trash folders too.
Are accounts to login being manually approved?
thanks,
bp
@bigpoppa…..at Roost?
@bigpoppa
I’m going to ask our development team to look into this issue. Can you send me your email please drew.izzo at roost dot com
thanks,
Drew
FYI – Roost.com paid for the independent study from WAV group. I don’t think that was mentioned in the comments above from roost.com so I want to call that out.
And techcrunch has some coverage of the WAV group study, as well as some compare-contrast with results on zillow/trulia, etc.
Techcrunch article here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/22/how-accurate-are-listings-on-real-estate-sites/
I signed up for Roost but have no idea how to use it. Their website does not have good instructions.