Realogy brand Better Homes and Gardens launched its revamped web site. Lots of new content, including a revamped video section and brand new video platform (provided by Brightcove). All very cool and it looks great.
So while visiting the new site it also gave me a chance to have another look at BHG’s search tool, which I hadn’t played with for a while.
I can definitely say that it has one of the nicest user interfaces of any major real estate brand web site and rivals (even exceeds) many of the third party search sites. I have to agree with Greg at Vendor Alley who writes “[it is] simply gorgeous, and very intuitive.”
It has some really nice subtle touches – like filtering by the age of the home. And I loved how the search results are grouped in to price brackets. Also geeks like me are going to love you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your search results.
It all shows me that they really spent some time thinking through how a real estate consumer will perform a search and how they want to get the data returned.
Problem is, as gorgeous as the site is… it doesn’t seem to work.
Just like Greg – I was surprised how few listings it returned in my neighborhood (zip code 97219). Only 29 listings on BHG versus 460 on Realtor.com and 466 on a local broker’s website.
Weird.
Another beef is that it seems totally borked in Safari 4.0.
I could not get the site to do any kind of search on my Mac. Clicking around on the buttons or drop-downs did absolutely nothing. This forced me to fire up my backup browser Firefox, which also gave me some weird display errors in FF 3.5.
Granted these are both very new versions of each browser, so it’s not surprising to find these kind of hiccups.
I hope these two errors are simply launch day bumps. I know how hard it is to come out of the gates with something that works with every machine, in every instance – it can be a truly Herculean task.
But I hope these kinks get ironed out quickly. It’d be a shame to spoil such a great experience with small little bugs like these.
