Today, I had the pleasure of speaking with DotHomes.com founder, Douglas de Jager, a smart chap from the UK who launched the Google-like real estate search engine in the U.S. on January 28, 2008. It has been in the search game since May 2006, when it was known as Extate (with UK and South Africa listings– it claims to have the most South African properties and second most in the UK).
Founders Douglas de Jager and Artemi Krymski (from Elevator Pitch– a good read on the lads’ plans to rule the world of real estate search)
DotHomes is one of the new kids on the U.S. real estate block, yet it already has 1.6 million listings! Today, the company announced a partnership with RealtyTrac to integrate RT’s 400,000 foreclosure listings into its database.
Unlike Yahoo, Trulia and Roost, DotHomes is not feed fed.
Instead, it has decided to use the Google model and simply crawl broker websites for listings– sales and rentals. Each listing displays one photo, price, beds and baths and a text description. Clicking the image takes you to the listing on the broker’s website. Listings can be saved during searches. DotHomes allows home videos to be uploaded to the site.
Search is via the open ended Google-style text box. Results can be refined by price, baths, square footage, and date. When I asked about a map based search, Douglas said maybe. He seemed more concerned with building the database of listings, as he should be.
Their secret sauce appears to be an automated data extraction engine which, when it finds a broker website, is able to crawl and parse the data correctly.
DotHomes has early stage VC funding. It plans to make money selling ads. The company, based in the UK, is looking to partner with a company with marketing clout (possibly a newspaper empire) to achieve brand recognition.
If brokers don’t object to DotHomes crawling their sites (and Douglas says none have), more search engines are sure to follow.
Check out the DotHomes blog.
Welcome to the US market and hope good things for your site.
Nice site. Tried a search on my city with city name and foreclosures. Came up with over 500 homes. Strangely enough, the MLS lists only 234. I wonder where the discrepancy is?