Online housing search Web site Roost.com launched last week in 13 metro areas, including the Washington-Baltimore region. But with other sites already in the market, Roost.com may have an uphill battle to distinguish itself.
The site features the ability to map nearby locations to specific houses such as stores, schools, gas stations and restaurants. Users are also able to pull up pictures for a specific listing while still staying on the search results page. Roost also plans to offer the ability to search keywords like “hardwood floors” in the first quarter of 2008. The site has sliding scales that can be set for variables such as price ranges, number of bedrooms and baths, and square footage.
“The experience of searching for houses isn’t as easy as it should be,” said Alex Chang, chief executiveofficer of Roost.com.
The scaling capability is unique, said Kathleen Allardyce, president of Georgia-based real estate Web site designer Getting It Write Inc. Her company has designed between 150 and 200 sites for brokerage firms and agents.
Douglas Pope, co-founder and director of operations of competitor HotPads.com, said there’s about a half a dozen similar, third-party sites that include Web 2.0 technology, including Zillow.com and Trulia.com.
Even so, real estate is a “huge market,” Pope said, with a demand for more technology and the ability to deliver leads to agents. “It’s definitely not too late in the game for them to get traction.”
Unlike some other sites though, San Francisco-based Roost.com charges brokerage firms and Realtors on a pay-per-click basis to generate traffic to their individual sites. Metro-area clients include Prudential Carruthers and Coldwell Banker Elite.
