Zoocasa: A New Canadian Real Estate Search Site
Canada has a new real estate search site and honestly I am not sure if we need one. Canada is VERY lucky to have a place in mls.ca (soon/eventually to disappear) and realtor.ca where you can find virtually every property for sale on the MLS in Canada. There is no equivalent in the U.S. and possibley not any where else in the world. In this US there is realtor.com but you must pay to put your listings there and so of course they are not all there. Then there is zillow, roost, realseekr, and trulia to name but a few of the web 2.0 real estate site that have appeared in the U.S. over the past number of years. None of these sites have Canadian lisitings on them, yet.
Now these sites are all trying to get all the listings and then present the data is a way that is the easiest and most enjoyable to work with (the UI, or user interface). Mostly they do a better job than realtor.ca, but NONE of them have all the listings, most being lucky to have 1/2 of what realtor.com has, and even it does not have all the listings. Realtor.ca has, effectivey, ALL the listings and getting that data from the powers that be is not easy.
So here we have zoocasa. From what I can tell the listings are mostly coming from the Sutton franchise website and from Point2Homes.com and Point2Agent websites. Luckily that means my lisitngs will appear there and there are which is nice, but will anyone go and look for them there other than me?! Not many Canadians would be my guess.
The home page asks to you put in your city or neighbourhod of choice and there are drop down menus where you can add details like price, bedrooms and bathrooms. (sidenote: I am always amazed the different results you get between 0 and 1 bathrooms. Are there really any homes in Vancouver without an inside toilet?) Actually I found those less than intuitive and have just been pluncking in the city name and then refininig on the next page, which looks like this.
I put in some criteria hoping to find one of my listings and I got 25 results on the nice integrated google map and I clicked on the one I thought was mine (and it was, YEAH!) so the dot turned orange and a listing summary appeared on the right.
So I wanted to see the details and they looked like this:
Which looked nice and offers a link back to the "Original Listing". You will see that on the right under the map one of the cool features here. There is a commute cost calculator. I put in a typical commute from here to downtown and it looked like this.
Below the listing info there is the other interesting, although limited, feature of zoocasa and that is stats. The stats are nice and all but there is an asterix that says "Note: Average prices based on properties deemed available on Zoocasa which contain pricing information." If the stats don't have all the data how useful are they? Take a look at them.
Overall it is fun to play with, but without all the listings, and I think we should make them more widely available (that is a whole other post/issue) I think realtor.ca will win out. You can read a interview with the zoocasa folks as the blogTO who reveal that the site is actually owned by Rogers and not some nice little tech start-up up geeks. Too bad.
Matthew Collinge: Vancouver REALTOR®
