DotHomes
One of the UK’s best real estate search sites has now launched itself in the US. DotHomes was founded two years ago by Artemi Krymski and Douglas De Jager, both computer science students from Imperial College, London and has been functional in the UK and also in South Africa. Now it has made the jump over the ocean to the US.
I August 2007 they had received their first round of funding from the Accelerator Group (TAG) a venture capital firm which has also backed other highly successful sites. Now it seems that the funding was done with the idea to facilitate this launch.
It enters into the US market as a search engine and has called itself the Google of real estate. It however does not source broker feeds from the internet nor does it have any links to MLSes but uses search spiders to find listings from all over the internet.
There is a problem with this approach however. If you crawl listings you do not end up getting nearly as much coverage as you would have liked and also very often results are out dated and inaccurate.
Having said all that DotHomes still wants to give it a shot. They hope to earn money from the site through advertisements for ancillary services and by sending some free traffic their brokers’ way.
However since all that they have to do here is replicate technology that already exists, it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. And the internet hasn’t done much yet for real estate in the US. Maybe things will begin to change soon.
There are a lot of buyers and sellers around looking for the perfect deal. Maybe DotHomes will actually match such buyers and sellers. As of now with their success record, no one’s complaining.
One of the UK’s best real estate search sites has now launched itself in the US. DotHomes was founded two years ago by Artemi Krymski and Douglas De Jager, both computer science students from Imperial College, London and has been functional in the UK and also in South Africa. Now it has made the jump over the ocean to the US.
I August 2007 they had received their first round of funding from the Accelerator Group (TAG) a venture capital firm which has also backed other highly successful sites. Now it seems that the funding was done with the idea to facilitate this launch.
It enters into the US market as a search engine and has called itself the Google of real estate. It however does not source broker feeds from the internet nor does it have any links to MLSes but uses search spiders to find listings from all over the internet.
There is a problem with this approach however. If you crawl listings you do not end up getting nearly as much coverage as you would have liked and also very often results are out dated and inaccurate.
Having said all that DotHomes still wants to give it a shot. They hope to earn money from the site through advertisements for ancillary services and by sending some free traffic their brokers’ way.
However since all that they have to do here is replicate technology that already exists, it shouldn’t be too difficult to do. And the internet hasn’t done much yet for real estate in the US. Maybe things will begin to change soon.
There are a lot of buyers and sellers around looking for the perfect deal. Maybe DotHomes will actually match such buyers and sellers. As of now with their success record, no one’s complaining.
