The real estate crisis settled in Uncle Sam’s country. This means tougher times for Realtors. Each and every bit of their marketing dollars will have to be spent wisely from now on. Enters Roost, a powerful real estate search engine: Roost is here to drive qualified traffic to Realtors.
Instead of trying to list all the properties in the US like Zillow, or take in feeds from individual real estate brokers like Trulia, Roost negotiates with Multiple Listing Services to provide complete and always up-to-date SERPs.
As Drew Izzo, former CMO at Ancestry.com and now new CMO at Roost, explains in the video, this allows the General Catalyst Partners’ backed venture to offer competitive features in the real estate search engine arena.
For example, a user looking for a home will fine-tune his search on a multi-criteria basis (Roost offers a rich selection of home criteria); the search can be saved and the user can request email alerts. Since Roost’s listing are complete and updated multiple times a day, users will receive alerts as soon as a new house that fits their criteria is on the market.
While a powerful search is not the only feature that house-seekers are looking for (social features play a heavy part in decision-making too), Roost is definitely what I would call the Google of real estate search engines. To my opinion, Roost is not a competitor to other real estate search providers online: Roost is their search engine back-end solution.
Other resources:
Roost Appoints Drew Izzo as Chief Marketing Officer – A bird’s eye view (Roost’s blog)
Real-Estate Search Engine Roost Launches With Full MLS Listings – Techcrunch
Roost’s Bullish on Real Estate Search – ClickZ
Roost.com Kicks over the RE Search Cart – Future of real estate marketing