DotHomes, the UK/South African real estate search engine, is launching into the US market today, 18 months after launch. DotHomes.com is funded by three of Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firms: The Accelerator Group, backers of GlassesDirect and lastminute; Arts Alliance, backers of LOVEFiLM, lastminute and propertyfinder; and Samos Investments, which funded the online betting exchange Betfair. The question, is will the US - packed to the gunnels with property search engines and in a sub-prime slump - actually notice?
Looks like last roll of the dice. There is very little traction for DotHomes in UK. So why not throw a few more VC pennies at it, move to the states and hope some US company snaps them up before the cash runs out.
Great news! Finally another UK company to take on the world) DotHomes is way better than any US sites out there, I wish them good luck.
@Mike: so much for showing support for British startups!!
@No Chance: IMO they already have the largest number of listings after RightMove, and the UK market is far more crowded than US. Any US company would be lucky to snap em up!
@James
They may claim that they’ve got the largest number of listings after rightmove but I would say Nestoria has more. If you look at rent section on DotHomes you will hardly find anything.
@James - You appear to have confused TechCrunch with a PR company. We’re not here to PR-companies - British or not - but to cast an independent eye over the market. I didn’t say dotHomes would fail, I merely point out that the US is a very saturated market for property. It’s tough out there.
Afternoon, folks.
Some friendly banter today? I trust we all had a particularly good weekend.
Mike, thanks for the post.
No chance, thanks for the thought. Let me rather boldly suggest: you might be surprised to know how things are developing - in the UK, South Africa and now in the US.
Janusz, just to clarify, as Nestoria’s Ed has done previously: DotHomes and Nestoria are not strictly speaking of the same sort. Nestoria is a meta search site, which currently searches over property portals (like PropertyFinder and Fish4). In so doing, Nestoria works with the portals, by driving traffic to these portals. By contrast, DotHomes searches only over estate agent sites, directly rivaling the portal model. There’s actually room for collaboration between DotHomes and Nestoria: something which Ed and I have already discussed.
Thanks.
Douglas
Wow, seems the site is live, it looks really good to me! I love they way the map appears when your searching for random stuff. They are a small company, so lack of traction, if that’s even true, is probably more to do with lack of advertising and PR.
It seems to be that they don’t have many rents, (not their focus) no one beats gumtree there anyway, but that’s because (if I understand this right) they get their listings from estate agents and not people like rightmove, which is what Nestoria do I think? That’s probably why Nestorias are all out of date.
Hi John,
Ed from Nestoria here.
Can you send me some examples of specific listings that are out of date so we can investigate? Cheers.
Freshness is a big problem in the industry, online and off. Every estate agent will always have properties in their window or on their website. We do quite a bit of work to promote newer listings, and you’ll notice that next to each listing we show exactly when it was last updated - so we’re working on it. Doesn’t mean we can’t be better. It’s especially tricky for fast moving segments of the market like rentals and in big cities (ie London).
Please send me some specific examples (via the Nestoria feedback form) and we’ll dive in.
thanks,
Ed
my 2p’s worth - Its refreshing to see sites based around the needs of users (great search) rather than those of suppliers, case in point the property portals who jump to the tune of the estate agents - user focused sites will ultimately win out so good luck to dothomes, nestoria, zoomf, globrix etc
That said, USA market has MLS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_Listing_Service) which holds pretty much all properties for sale on one central database making them available to any real estae broker who wants them the listing aggregation is not going to be a winning play in the USA as it might be over here.
Bottom line is that there are many great property sites out there, key is how do you build sustainable traffic to them? Answers on a post card
Douglas,
Why the name change to “dothomes” from “Extate”?
“dothomes” IMO, is a disastrous name. It’s impossible to tell someone what the name of the site is…
- Charles
probably because dotcom.com was already taken