Clickz gives us a little tidbit today that financial and real estate data is coming to AskCity.
The AskCity service, launched earlier this month as a standalone destination for local search and mapping features with business listings, events, and movie listings, will be expanded in 2007 to offer data from LendingTree.com and CitySearch, two IAC-owned properties that specialize in financial services and real estate information.
I like AskCity‘s new site (see my post Monday Morning Discoveries). Their site is simple enough to use, though I still find myself defaulting to Google Local for most of my neighborhood searches.
I’m curious to see to what extent they plan on integrate real estate information on the site. The big question is, of course, will they or won’t they add property listings to the site?
If you start to follow the trail though, you see that LendingTree owns RealEstate.com. In some states (Washington and Oregon), RealEstate.com is already a licensed broker and so has access to the IDX feeds direct from the MLS. This model could, in theory, begin to extend to other states as well.
Digging around on their site a little more, there is a working beta at the Texas RealEstate.com site that already includes map results from Ask.com.
It’s rough and obviously a work in progress but to my eyes at least, it looks very similar to Trulia.
How this will play out on the main site is unclear, but its obvious to me that AskCity is in the process of figuring out how to display real estate listings. Putting the little pieces of the puzzle together convinces me that these folks are serious about entering the real estate search game in a big way.
Stay tuned.
