Homezilla: Another Canadian Web 2.0 Real Estate Site - I don't get it
Wow it seems like some people somewhere think there is money in the Canadian web 2.0 real estate hills, but me, I don't get it. The examples are there in the U.S. with trulia and zillow but with zoocasa and househunting.ca (which is so bad it doesn't deserve a review, or a link) there are no signs of a great Canadian real estate web 2.0 site yet. The biggest problem, as it is in the U.S., is the listings. And it is an even bigger problem here. In the U.S. there is NO one site with all the listings in the country. In Canada that site already exists in realtor.ca (mls.ca died today!) and CREA (the Canadian Real Estate Association) does not want to give up the data to every web 2.0 provider that wants to profit from it. Now whether or not they should is another question.
So Homezilla is here now and they are not even trying to have listings, but without them will anyone care? They are billing themselves as "Your home buying and neighbourhood research assistant". Basically you put in city or neighbourhood you want to live in and it tells you what is there and shows it to you on a google map. Whoopee! It looks like this, notice the prominence of liquor stores:
but couldn't I just go to yellowpages.ca.
What do you think? Do you see any reason to go to homezilla? Here is link to their news release:
http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/September2008/30/c9726.html
Matthew Collinge: Vancouver REALTOR®
