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Is Roost.com roosting on the brass ring? Start-up Realty.bot comes to market with two firsts: MLS listings and a business plan

What if somebody built a Realty.bot that seemed to make sense from Day 1? What kind of goof-ball strategy is that in the wacky world of Web 2.0?

I don’t know if Roost.com really has a business to bank on. The search.bot horizons are starting to look a little crowded. But unlike past entrants, the company is entering the field with two unprecedented features: They’re working from real MLS listings, via member-brokers’ IDX feeds, and they actually have a strategy for monetizing their efforts.

Yawn! YAMBS again? That’s Yet-Another-Map-Based-Search, a transition in the course of two years from the cool to the commonplace. I haven’t been able to play with Roost.com yet, but my guess would be that they’re behind the curve on cool-factors. The search tools seem to be more than adequate, but Roost is all about search, with none of the social-theater-of-the-mind games the older Realty.bots have been rolling out.

This is nothing but residential real estate search, with 13 major markets being served at today’s roll-out. Since the listings come from IDX feeds, Roost.com needs at least one broker relationship for every MLS system it wants to service.

There’s more. Roost.com plans to make money by delivering prospects back to member brokers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. In one scenario, as in the screen-shot above, the broker can have his own private-label Roost.com IDX system hosted on a third-level-domain — e.g., tarbell.roost.com. Every click originating on that site would go back to Tarbell.

Alternatively, brokers can participate directly on the Roost.com system, with the end-user click-throughs being distributed in a manner similar to Google’s Adwords program: Participating brokers would be selected at random based on their desired spending goals.

I’m eager to play with the system, because what I’ve seen of it so far seems cool. As an example, the image below shows a windolet of photos. You can have more than one of these open at one time, so you can compare photos from multiple properties.

Roost.com is essentially a free IDX system for brokers that they would only have to pay for when they are receiving benefits from it — this in the form of leads to potential home-buyers. The IDX systems available at a monthly cost in many markets are so poor that Roost may prove to be a potent weapon in a broker’s arsenal.

What’s the downside? You’re paying for leads. The cost-per-click system makes the spend manageable, and having real MLS listings — as opposed to the grab-bag of catch-as-catch-can listings on other Realty.bots — is a real bonus. But it remains that brokers are giving away their listings in order to buy them back again.

If there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s here: The emergence of one new Realty.bot after another is going to drive the cost per lead purchased down to its lowest imaginable commodity level. Companies like Roost.com may still be able to make big money. But more labor-intensive operations, like HouseValues.com, could be in for a rougher ride.

 
PS: I wrote about Roost.com last August. So far, they’ve delivered more than I expected.

 
PPS: From Roost.com’s press release:

Roost, an innovative platform for real estate search, launched today in public beta. Roost partners with Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) to help local real estate brokers and agents attract high-quality consumer traffic directly to their Web sites via an intuitive search tool. Roost offers consumers an advanced, highly visual search experience, complete with comprehensive property listings, to help them find the right home fast.

Roost’s platform brings together a network of individual real estate broker Web sites and a comprehensive search engine. This approach ensures that consumers have access to the freshest and most accurate property listings as soon as they are available. Local brokers and REALTORS® can leverage the high quality of the MLS listings to attract additional, self-selected and highly relevant traffic to their core Web sites.

Unlike other online real estate platforms, Roost’s network of broker sites ensures consumers have access to comprehensive MLS listings in major metropolitan areas across the U.S., via close collaborations with MLSs and leading local brokers that can help them find their next home. The Roost platform currently covers the Atlanta; Baltimore; Boise, Idaho; Boston; Chicago; Dallas; Houston; Minneapolis, Minn.; Orange County, Calif.; Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento/Modesto, Calif.; San Diego and Washington D.C. areas and will expand quickly into additional markets nationwide.

“The current real estate climate is a tough one for everyone, so our aim is really two-fold: to empower local brokers in their online marketing and sales efforts, and help consumers find the right home at the right price,” said Alex Chang, CEO of Roost.

For the real estate industry, Roost offers an innovative online marketing vehicle for brokers and REALTORS®. It provides individual “IDX” sites as part of its platform, which use MLS listings in compliance with local policies to attract and qualify self-selected, relevant buyers and sellers to local REALTOR®’s sites.

 
Elsewhere: TechCrunch, Joel, Dustin, Jay, C|Net, Ron Ares.

Me at TechCrunch, answering what seems to be the question of the day, how can Roost.com get enough traffic:

As with Trulia’s push into private-label real estate search on major media web sites, Roost’s strategy of offering branded IDX search to brokerages is a way around the problem of attracting traffic. The Roost.com site may not score all that well on national hit-counters, but if they can draw people in one small private-label site at a time, they can get the traffic they need to make money. At the least, it’s refreshing to see a business plan that isn’t based on advertising.

Why would this work? Joel answers that question:

How it works is, in each market, the search results are sponsored by an individual broker (e.g. “Portland listings brought to you by…”). As a consumer, if you want more information on any particular listing, including contact information, all the traffic drives through to that sponsoring broker’s site.

Every market however, can have an unlimited number of sponsors and the sponsors rotate in based on the amount of traffic they have bought. This is perfect for some of the smaller brokerages that may not have many listings to market themselves (and therefore can’t participate in Z or T’s listings feeds) but are still looking to court buyers online.

Roost also offers those brokers a co-branded/private labeled search interface they can embed into their site too.

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