Google retreats from real estate listings

Tim Burrowes

January 27, 2011 6:43

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.

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Tim Burrowes

Tim Burrowes is the publisher of Mumbrella and Unmade. He co-founded Mumbrella in 2008 and sister title Unmade in 2021. He's worked in the UK, Middle East, Asia & Australia and has specialised in writing about the communications world for the last 25 years. He wrote the book Media Unmade, published in 2021, and became the presenter of MediaLand on ABC Radio National in 2025.

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4 COMMENTS

Steady On 27 Jan 11

and people/google fanboys said this would threaten the real estate players …

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Simon Baker 28 Jan 11

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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vitas 8 Feb 11

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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Saddened 8 Feb 11

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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