Every Monday on AltSearchEngines we feature a different set of Vertical Search Engines. This week we take a look at European Real Estate / Property search engines. I really only have seven, but don’t worry, I compusively worked it up to an even ten.

 

What makes Globrix different?  Globrix exists to allow users to search nearly every property for sale or to rent in the UK down to the last detail.

The first thing we should explain is that we’re not a property listing site. We’re a true property search engine. So what’s the difference? Property listing services charge estate agents a fee, and in exchange bring their properties to a wider audience. Nothing wrong with that. It’s just that agents won’t pay to list on every single website. So if you rely on a property listing site, you’re only ever going to see a fraction of the properties available at any one time.

But Globrix is different. Estate agents don’t have to come to us with a list of properties that they’d like to promote online, we go to them. Or rather, our ultra-clever software does. It tracks down almost every single estate agent in the UK and scours their websites, coming back with a nearly perfect list of what’s available to buy or rent. Note that we said, “almost every” and “nearly perfect”. That’s because in the property market things move quickly. For example, If a new agent starts trading one Saturday morning, our software probably won’t find their listing… for a few hours, at least.

But we do more than just list the homes that are for sale or rent. Globrix allows users to sort through results by keywords. Looking for a house with a pool? Or off-street parking? Or even a nuclear bunker? Globrix now allows you to do this, saving you time and helping you find your perfect home (after all, we all know it is not simply about price and location when choosing your home).

With 4 million listings, 50 countries, 32 languages…
Properazzi is the largest database of real estate listings anywhere in the world. The company achieved this incredible milestone only months after launching this year by applying sophisticated, scalable search engine technology to simultaneously index the listings of more than 10,000 agencies, brokers, builders, portals, and classifieds sites. 

Properazzi’s investment in world-class engineering solutions for problems in scalable crawling, machine learning, content deduplication, place name disambiguation, index faceting, and more has resulted in a unique product that is experiencing rapidly rising website traffic

Zoomf is a property search engine based in London. Visitors to Zoomf are treated to a comprehensive list of UK properties for sale and let, combining a highly usable interface with a colourful design, bringing some fun to the business of online property search. While Zoomf provides all the  functionality of other leading property search engines, such as mapping facilities and the ability to refine a search by property features, they also boast a new search tool, Visual Search.

Visual Search allows users to search for their home by drawing a line around the area they wish to live, directly onto a map, freeing users from the restrictions found with area and postcode based searches. It is free for Estate agents to list their properties, meaning Zoomf can provide it’s users with a comprehensive and unbiased list of  properties for sale and let.   However, there are a number of creative advertising packages for agents who seek a more prominent position on Zoomf.

Nestoria is a search engine for property in the UK and Spain. According to comscore (Oct 2007) Nestoria has approximately 200,000 unique users in the UK and 70,000 in Spain.  The site has gained popularity by focusing on four things: comprehensiveness, relevancy, usability, and freshness. Users can search a database of over 450,000 homes to buy and let in the UK and 600,000 in Spain. Results are sorted relevantly and presented in clear fashion with a map. Users have the ability to overlay relevant data like transport links, schools, pubs, local photos, etc with their search results.

Users also have access to many property search tools ranging from GeoRSS and KML feeds, to house price widgets, Facebook applications and a full property data API.  Nestoria is active in the opensource community and has sponsored several open source events like the London Perl Workshop or the OpenStreetMap conference. The site is used by Google as the Google Maps case study and Nestoria was the only start up invited to present at Google’s 2007 London Developer Day.

Nuroa is a real estate search engine specialised in the German and Spanish property markets. We launched our two sites — www.nuroa.de  and www.nuroa.es– at  DEMO Germany in October 2007. Whereas some of our competitors focus on multiple verticals or on being present in numerous countries, our goal is a lot simpler — to make sure that real estate purchasers can see all available real estate listings in each of our key markets. We will not officially launch our product in any market until we have more listings than the market-leading online real estate portal — that’s the key test that any vertical search engine must be able to surpass in order to justify its existence. To that end, nuroa already offers 1 million properties for sale and rental in Spain and Germany.

Nuroa is a “vertical search” engine like products offered by our main competitors, but we choose to emphasize the “search” over the “vertical”. This means that, like Google, our primary goal is to give our users the most precise and relevant search results currently available. The only difference is that we limit the results to real estate listings.  Our emphasis on “search”doesn’t mean, however, that we ignore the “vertical”. In fact, nuroa is the only property search engine to offer “intuitive search”, which means that in addition to property ads, nuroa also offers on each results page information that prospective property buyers might find useful, such as:

    * photos of the neighborhood being sought,
    * blog posts and newspaper articles about topics of interest to the community being investigated,
    * a real estate guide that describes each neighborhood and provides tips for buying or renting a house in that neighborhood.

Trovit is a search engine for classifieds: it helps users find interesting ads in less time and it drives qualified visitors to classifieds sites.  We had 2.5 million unique users in November.

We currently search for real estate ads, cars and jobs in six European countries (UK, Spain, France, Italy, Germany and Portugal) and we are expanding into more countries in Europe and Latin America. Our technology allows us to search for any kind of classifieds while at the same customizing the interface for any vertical (ie, real estate) or country.

Our objective is to allow users to find all the ads published on the Internet, whether they are published on classifieds sites, real estate sites, job boards, real estate agents, car dealers, recruitment agencies, company websites, etc. In some cases we crawl the original sources of the ads to find all the available ads and in other cases we partner with the sources to integrate their ads on our search engine. We currently have more than 5 million ads in our index.

DotHomes is a real estate search engine—a “Google of property”.  Consumers use DotHomes to quickly search over hundreds of estate agent Websites across multiple countries, with relevant search results taking consumers to property listings on these Websites. Underlying DotHomes’ search mechanism is a proprietary data-mining technology which allows for scalable and accurate indexing (aggregation) of property listings directly from estate agency Websites—with zero cost or effort for estate agents.

DotHomes offers a real alternative to the traditional directory Websites for real estate search (like RightMove, PrimeLocation and PropertyFinder). These Websites require that estate agents send in datafeeds of their property listings, and estate agents are charged a monthly fee for the privilege. DotHomes also offers an alternative to the new “mashup” Websites, which index only the directory Websites—and thereby do not link through to the original, potentially richer and more up-to-date property listings on the sourcing estate agent Websites.

For estate agents, DotHomes provides a free and effortless marketing platform. For house hunters, DotHomes provides the easiest and most transparent way to find properties on the Web.  In terms of user interface, several features mark DotHomes out as a market leader. These include its uniquely intelligent one-box search, heat maps showing price-per-square-foot variations from area to area, user-provided video tours of properties (submitted from PC or mobile), and a password-less saving functionality.

BEATyouThere.com is currently in Stealth mode.


Zoekallehuizen.nl is de zoekmachine die dagelijks vrijwel alle websites van makelaars bezoekt en ook het woningaanbod van particulieren meeneemt. 


What is Rotten Neighbor?

We are the first real estate search engine of its kind that helps you find bad neighbors before you move so you don’t regret the purchase of your new house, home, condo or apartment.

Our goal is to be an exceptionally smart assistant when you are looking to move into a new neighborhood. We hope that you will be able to find your dream home in your dream neighborhood by using our data and information provided by other users such as yourself. We then hope you will return the favor to other home buyers by adding to our database.

It doesn’t matter if you are moving down the street or all the way across the county, we are here to help you find and discover bad neighbors no matter where you are thinking about relocating. When you are going to make one of the biggest decisions in your life we are here to help you make a choice you won’t regret later when you might discover a bad neighbor living right next door. We show you detailed maps of states, counties, cities and neighborhoods all searchable by ZIP code.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.