Interview with Mike Carter of Zoomf.com

Last week Zoomf announced their long awaited nationwide rollout. Business Development Manager Mike Carter took time out to answer a few questions I had for him ...

What differentiates Zoomf from other online property search tools and applications?

Good question. Well there is a lot you could point to so it depends on from what point of view you are asking so I'll break it down;

1. front end
2. back end

1. On the front end we have visual search, the ability to draw shapes on maps and say that is my search area. We also have a draggable map that auto-populates. Our listings are postage stamps horizontally which we've not seen in other sites and we also have landing pages for properties which some of the other search engines do not have. It's still early days for all the new players, so I'm sure the front-ends will adapt as they see fit.

2. The Zoomf backend is a custom application built from open source including the Lucene product from apache. I suppose that is the biggest thing that differentiates us from the portals and other search engines. We are not a meta search engine (getting a feed from a portal then doing search).

What has been the greatest challenge so far

Raising money in the UK as opposed to the US and growing a cohesive team to fire on all cylinders.

What are the strategies for monetizing the service and how are those strategies being implemented?

There are a lot of monetization plans in place but our first live product is here: www.zoomf.com/geoads
Outside GEO ADs, you're going to see a lot from Zoomf in '08 as far as innovative marketing programs for agents and general advertisers.

What plans (if any) does Zoomf have for further expansion

We have international ambitions but for the first half of 2008 we want to get the UK right. By the way our national index is live
:-)

What impact is the credit crunch and housing market slowdown having on your business?

None as of yet. A housing slow down just means that capturing audience more efficiently becomes even more important. The internet is still the first port of call for property research. With the decline of print advertising and the cost differentials between online and print, there is still huge growth going on in the sector.

Thanks Mike for answering my questions, it looks like 2008 will shape up to be an intensely competitive environment for the vertical search industry and hopefully Zoomf's audience capturing strategy will prove successful for them.