International expansion of UK search engines

We're lucky to have an exclusive screenshot of Nestoria's upcoming German search engine, following on the heels of its highly successful Spanish version. Although Lokku (parent company behind Nestoria) haven't officially said anything yet, the company is actively seeking employees in Germany and Italy via its blog, which indicates imminent activity in those markets.
Elsewhere in the search engine world, Douglas de Jagger of dotHomes is now claiming over a million listings on its US site according to Sellsius. The ambitious duo see the housing slump in the US as an opportunistic time to enter the market as opposed to a challenge, representing an 'alternative model' to traditional broker listings.
However, competition is big in the US and dotHomes is up against some heavyweights. When Artemi and I last spoke he mentioned the challenges and admitted that if he didn't tackle them somebody like Google would. Zillow, Redfin and Trulia are practically household brands in the US, and they represent strong competition too. But the downturn in the economy is based mainly on housing and I have to wonder how many consumers are likely to really care about searching for property online or 'Zillowing' their house to see that it's now worth nearly half of what is was worth last year? Depressing.
Notwithstanding, Art and Doug are full of energy and ambition and Sellsius claims they have now teamed up with a service called RealtyTrac to integrate 400,000 foreclosure listings into the dothomes database. Positive news for some I guess, however, again, my question is who will be doing the searching and why. Most consumers in the US now aren't in a position to buy, with the credit markets drying up and the investment banks going bust, things are likely to get worse before they get better. The successful 2.0 company that's likely to weather the storm is the one that has the most resources at its disposal. Right now (outside of the 'big three' Google, Yahoo, MSFT) it seems like Zillow is in pole position, followed closely by Trulia. Again, I pay very little attention to the US industry, following it mostly via FoREM and Inman, so I don't know the ins and outs. but if I remember correctly, Zillow is sitting on close to $80 mill and Trulia has about $20 mill and is growing rapidly in traffic and brand recognition. Dothomes / Byteplay have nowhere close to that, but what they claim to have is superior technology. However they don't have exclusive ownership of that technology which can easily be duplicated and has already happened in the US with a company called Roost, launching right around the same time as they did.
Meanwhile, although Nestoria's European expansion has received much less media attention, one has to appreciate the dynamics of the European housing markets, particularly in comparison with the US. For the moment it appears that things are much more stable in European housing than in the US. That may change in some markets, particularly the UK. But Germany on the other hand has been touted by many international property experts as the safest short to medium term bet.




2 comments:
Harvey,
To clarify:
1) Roost does not have data mining technology, they get listings from brokers / MLSes
2) If our technology would be easy to duplicate then others would have done so. The fact is we've crawled more listings in each country we've entered than anyone else.
3) The housing slump may not be a good thing in general, yet it hasn't stopped Trulia's growth (traffic and revenue wise). There's still an enormous untapped opportunity there to take on the big players like Realtor.com
Perhaps REA will expand to US? Watch this interview with Simon Baker & Trulia, quite funny :)
http://www.rightmovez.co.uk/2008/04/17/rea-interview/
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