Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.
The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still needs to go a bit further to keep pace with some of the technology leaders.
While the new Y!RE experience is intuitive, I found as I dug deeper into the results, it began to feel like there was often one too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. This was a little frustrating frankly.
More importantly however, the individual listing pages still felt somewhat spartan and vaguely underwhelming, especially compared to some of the newer search offerings like those on MRIS’ HomesDatabase (see MRIS Takes on the Search Sites).
All that said however, Steve Schultz, Senior Director for Yahoo! Real Estate writes on the Yahoo! blog that this is just the beginning; more is coming, including “a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services.”
In conjunction with the new public face to Yahoo! Real Estate, the company has also introduced a range of new features for Real Estate professionals. Brokers, if you’re already syndicating your listings to the portal, you can now log into Yahoo! and manage them all online.
Agents interested in tapping Yahoo!’s reach can purchase a classifieds listing on the site for $49.95 and are also encouraged by the company to give Yahoo! Sponsored Search a whirl to build traffic to their websites.
Despite a tough market and months of turmoil at the company, Yahoo! has made some impressive strides over the last couple of years in this space, and it looks like they are still committed to seeing their presence dial up. I’m looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.
