The Business of Online Home Search

I've been searching for a new house for the past several months.

I searched the Net with Google as the default search engine. I was just so pleasantly surprised to find even bigger, more innovative property and listing engines such as Trulia & Point2 Homes.

Point2 Homes was developed in Canada. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they listed over 500 agents direct from the Philippines! Many just recently joined, and I was glad to stumble upon it thanks to my habitual tendency to research. They had a lot of houses to show, too.

The technology and intuitive interface makes it easy to list and blog on a more regular basis. I first read about the possibility of doing a real estate blog integrated with other services such as online maps from Yuga. Google Maps energizes the home search process by plotting the location of those listed houses using of those green, squamous-cell-like 'things' that sort of pops out on the area like a mini-cobra. To what extent will it make the search easier--well, what do you think?

The concept of integration drives the continuous improvement of these sites. There's the blogs to build community of brokers. Well, not all brokers and agents can write. However, there were a few entries that seemed to read well about the area of their specialization.

Speaking of Point2Homes, this became an amazing online e-commerce application to come up with my own dynamic, databased new real estate listing website. I ended up including a good number of BF Homes, Paranaque direct listings--a result of those many days of searching on foot for the perfect house. These are the houses that didn't meet my needs, but may meet other home buyers' preferences!

I am now putting those listings on my pilot site, to load and syndicate with other Pinoy brokers across the world. Yup, I didn't forget to link to my own Architerra blog just to nudge the neural networking growth a wee bit.