A Word from one of our Sponsors: Bing

Who Will Own Real Estate Search?

Recently, Google announced that they’ll no longer support viewing property listings on Google Maps. Okay, good discussion topic since Google’s mission is to organize the world’s data and I guess real estate isn’t in the mix. At least not for now. Which raises the question about Real Estate and maps together as one and the happy mediums in which they get displayed. First off, I’m betting the real estate companies around the world are cheering about this news. That industry is superstitious to the nth degree about how multiple listing services (MLS) are used since that is their sacred cow for which they generate revenue. Which leads me to my conspiracy theories as to why they really took it down…and, perhaps why Bing never started in the first place. Just a reminder, these are just stupid theories I came up with.

Conspiracy Theory #1 – They finally violated some MLS rules about having to give credit and reference to the original seller brokerage since they were receiving data from all kinds of places.

Conspiracy Theory #2 – They’re trying to break into the enterprise business, no one is willing to pay them for what they’re historically given away for free and real estate sites have been abusing the free maps for years so they see upside and a potential revenue stream (they are trying to diversify that single source of income).

Conspiracy Theory #3 – The real estate market sucks so bad that not even Google is making money monetizing online visitors with conversion revenue sharing.

Conspiracy Theory #4 – It was becoming too much overhead to try to accommodate the business of real estate tools and it’s better left to the developers in that field. So, build a better platform.

So, map lovers, is there such a thing as too much data? Is it possible that we’ve finally found the end of what can be mapped onto a single experience? Are we saying that maps have a limited value for viewing data geographically and at the end of the day there’s just too much information and the search algorithms are too complex? Hmm. Unlikely.

Bing has this concept of “Collections” now called “My Places” that allows anyone to specify locations on a map (Google has something similar) and share the list with anyone via an email links A good percentage of collections are real estate agents who didn’t have the right tools from their brokerage to share data with consumers. I hired a wonderful agent (Babbs Weissman of Windermere) to help me find a house in Seattle and the tools she’s using to share properties with me are pretty rudimentary, the interface is list-based, and the map is an afterthought. So, I can’t find the “map all listings at once” function in the case that I want to see where they are in proximity to each other (or my office and other places I care about). So, even the tools that are available to agents have much left to be desired.

I’ve seen some wicked cool sites built with maps – John L. Scott is still my favorite – it’s fast and has a polygon drawing tool (neighborhood wizard) for specifying random areas along with different property attributes. I used to like Houston Association of Realtors (until the removed all the local information overlays – now the UX is complicated). I do like Zillow (neighborhood boundaries) and Windermere (HUGE MAP!) to round out the top 3. I don’t just like them because they use Bing (believe it or not). I like them because they provide tools and use hyper-local information.

At the end of the day, there’s plenty of work to be done in real estate. Plenty. Lots of UX work. Lots of data presentation work. Plenty of tools to be built for realtors and consumers. Bing Maps never stepped into the market and instead invested in building a platform that allowed our partners to get innovative with their data. The tools we provided complimented with the moved to Azure CDN (for performance) and Bird’s Eye Imagery and our slant on non-competitive customer markets allowed us to focus our attention elsewhere and gain inroads in the real estate enterprise market. I’ve seen a lot of innovation around Google’s Maps platform and there is healthy competition in the maps space.

Follow me @ChrisPendleton, ^CP

Note: my views do not represent Microsoft or Bing and are my own personal perspectives.
Chris Pendleton
Sr. Program Manager Lead, Bing Mobile
Microsoft Corporation