There’s always something to howl about.

“Google Places” is a “National Real Estate Search Engine”? Not so much.

…at least not yet.

On Sept 24th when the Google Blog announcement of Google Places was posted, there was no mention of Place Pages for Real Estate:

“A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.”

Notice they didn’t say “addresses” or “real estate listings”, but today over on SearchEngineLand,  there is a post by Matt Mcgee titled Google Builds out a National Real Estate Search Engine which features a “Real Estate Listing Place Page”, and several other outlets have picked up on it.

The Place Page that Matt uses as an example does indeed show that there are now Place Pages for listings that Google knows about via Google Base.

A closer look reveals that, at least at this point, this isn’t very different from what Google has done up to now.

The content on the example that Matt from SearchEngineLand used consists of photos from PrudentialProperties.com and redundant basic information from that site and two others.

As Real Estate listing pages go, its a hodgepodge with little added value, such as an AVM, or local market info, that you would find on a good IDX site for the same listing. Even Realtor.com’s basic listing page is better. If you want that detailed information Google, as it always has, provides the links back to the original real estate sites.

That makes this an extension of Google organic results, nothing more.

As a stand-alone listing detail page as opposed to the beefed-up search result page that it is, this “Real Estate Listing Place Page” is pretty half-assed by Google’s standards, which may be why Place Pages for real estate are currently hard to find.

I tried entering the address from Matt’s example in Google Maps, without putting the /realestate after the address, and was not offered the “more info” link that leads to the Place Page, even though we know it exists.

Then I tried entering the address on my new Droid (yes it rocks!) and, again, no real estate listing information was provided.

I also tried the address of a listing near me here in Newport RI — same thing, no link to a Place Page.

But when I tried the name of a business that operates on the street level of my building, Infant Interiors in Newport RI,  the “more info” link pops right up. I did not have to go to some sub-site of Google Maps, like /business, that no consumer has ever heard of.

And this is where it gets interesting, because Google provides business owners with a procedure for claiming and then editing information about their businesses right on the Place Page.

The “edit this place” link is conspicuously absent on the Real Estate listing Place Page.

Now HERE is the blueprint for how Google could, if they wanted to (and it is not clear that they do), make life miserable for NAR, local MLSes, Realtor.com, Trulia, franchise operated sites and IDX vendors.

Business owners who click on the “edit” link that is offered on Place Pages are taken to the “Local Business Center” — which is where you go if you want to correct information that often appears at the top of Google organic results:

google_lbc

OK, now let’s make this the first step in the Google MLS process:

googlerec

  1. This becomes “Edit my Property”
  2. In addition to the address, this could summarize the asking price, basic details, and perhaps agent info if the property owner chooses to give an agent access to this profile in much the same way you can add users to a Google Analytics account.
  3. This is the current validation scheme. Snail mail. Really, Google? Clearly, they could come up with something better and faster (SMS to a wireless # whose billing address matches the property perhaps?)

Notice that on the Place Page for Infant Interiors, people can add reviews, like the one I just wrote there.  If Google went this route for real estate, I doubt they would allow a homeowner, or agent, to have any control over the content anyone else adds, just like they aren’t giving the owner of Infant Interiors a way to delete bad reviews.

That is quite the opposite of the asinine opt out of 3rd party comments and AVM  that NAR just added to IDX policy, isn’t it?

What’s to stop Google from aggregating all the public data that Zillow or RPR use and adding that to the mix? Maybe they would just buy Zillow and be done with it.

Given that option, it’s easy to see how people, who are as distrustful of real estate agents as they have ever been in the wake of housing bubble, might migrate to a real estate information platform that is outside the industry’s control and has the added benefit of the familiar Google user experience.

When Google puts something like this out there, THEN its time to freak out if you are NAR, a local MLS, Move Inc, an IDX vendor, etc..

Until then, enjoy the borrowed time.