Google Builds Out Real Estate Search Engine

Google is rolling out individual place pages for every property that's listed in Google Maps. Is this a game changer? Love to hear some discussion here.

To reference the article in Search Engine Land, click here: bit.ly/3oXizI

Really like to hear your thoughts (but you might want to read the article before chiming in).

Thanks so much!
LT

Looks like Bing is getting into the mapping action as well.

searchengineland.com/bing-maps-steals-th...wn-from-google-31005

Hi Lisa T.,

I have briefly just scanned through what Google is doing. I do think it has some interesting advantages, but as of right now I don’t think it will hurt traffic to all of the ForRents, Apartment Guide and all those guys. But this is just their 1.0 version, there will be upgrades that could put some of those listing services in…dare I say jeopardy?

What it isn’t doing.
Right now when you type in say, Fort Myers apartments into Google all of the MLS come up. Nowhere does Google maps come up and in the findings. When you type in Fort Myers Pizza, the first thing that come up is Google maps listings. My guess is that as this real estate listing service become more robust they are going to put themselves right at the top of search results just like the pizza search. Then I would say they would begin to take some traffic away from the MLS and the other listing services.

I looks like they are pulling in some photos and information from listing sites such as Rent.com, Mynewplace.com and the others. I bet they will open this up for the agents and property managers to put in their own sales copy and photos.

Their Advantages
Ummm, they’re Google. They have an amazing map service that includes the awesome street view function. You can take a walk down the side walk of neighborhood without even moving there yet. Too cool. They will continue to upgrade the service and I think will eventually put themselves at the top of the search results for apartments and real-estate. Why wouldn’t they…that drives more ad dollars to them.

Those are my ideas on Google throwing it’s hat into the real estate information game.
Cheers!

The first thought that comes to mind for me is anti-trust. I say this falls under the same category/umbrella as Windows and Internet Explorer. Google's penetration of just over 70% is slightly lower than Microsoft's was, I believe, but I would imagine that type of dominance could easily warrant an investigation in the least. Google is already under investigation related to digitizing books, so this wouldn't be out of the question.

Now, how would it affect the ILS? Well, Ryan is right that in the short term they aren't capitalizing on this, but how long is that realistically supposed to last? Google already knows the top search phrases for real estate search, so they will artificially dominate every one of those. Once that happens, they immediately give themselves incredible market share, almost by magic. Those ILS's that depend on dominating the high traffic search terms will be impacted the quickest, in my opinion. Those that have focused on long-tail searches may be a bit better situated, depending on how far Google chooses to implement their results.

In the end, Google is violating their own concept of putting the most relevant content at the top, so will that result in any user backlash? Only time will tell...

We had a Google rep come by the office and walk us through our community regulating our information, times our office is open and our direct number. I don't know if it is because I have been recently aware but I have had 4 applicants state that they saw our information on Google Maps and contacted us through there, since the Google rep came by. We actually rented to 2 of them.

It just makes us be able to pin point us better and it is still directing them to our website and our website uses Rent.com for some services.