Google retreats from real estate listings
Google is to drop its real estate listings from Google Maps in a move that will come as a relief to Australia’s property websites.
Australia and New Zealand were among five countries where the service was launched in July 2009.
It allowed users to search via Google Maps for properties to buy or rent.
At the time of launch, the service appeared to threaten the business model of the likes of Fairfax’s domain.com.au and News Ltd’s realestate.com.au.
But the service relied on partnerships with estate agents and many did not appear to participate.
And in a posting today on Google Australia’s blog, Brian McClendon, VP of Google Earth and Maps said the company was “retiring” the offering from next month. He said:
“In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings), we’ve decided to discontinue the real estate feature within Google Maps on February 10, 2011.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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and people/google fanboys said this would threaten the real estate players …
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The team at http://www.propertyportalwatch.com have been watching Google real estate for some time and it doesnt come as much of a surprise that they walked away from the product.
The challenges faced included:
1) Quality of listings – it is easy to leave old listings up or put up fraudulent listings
2) The service was not intuitive to use – people like to search by lists rather than by map
3) The service was standalone – you had to go to maps and then select the real estate layers. They should have integrated it into the overall search
4) There was no clear monetisation model – while portals stopped spending on adwords, Google didnt find a way to replace that lost spend through PPC from agents
5) There was no clear champion for the product internally – basically for any service to succeed you need a champion and there didnt seem to be one
6) Finally, they didnt really understand the real estate industry and given how these vary from country to country, they were bound to fail to meet the local market requirements.
The winners? The existing portals and the vertical search engines.
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Google has done a great job, it’s quite disappointed to see this withdrawal.
Site portals using vertical search engines are not really a winner here. Many of them (e.g: http://www.rbasket.com.au) partly rely on Google for their data.
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I loved the Google map search for properties. I wish they would stick it out! I know an old guy in real estate and he knows the two big brands (as mentioned in a previous post) and goes with them. However with a little education from Google they would have a killer app and ‘old blokes in realestate’ might join the party(.)
Perhaps once places takes over the general directory world, then they might ramp up realestate again?
Sad to see it go.
Cant Google aggregate the content from the other sites and still offer the service?
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