While America Online boasted of launching a new Real Estate Center on Friday, the idea was more akin to rearranging existing furniture than building a whole new office to meet the needs of would-be home buyers.
Any excuse for an open house is not to be missed, though, as competition heats up in the emerging online real estate business. The sector is expected to generate revenues of US$13 million this year and grow to $190 million by 2002, according to Forrester Research.
AOL�s Real Estate Center, located within the online service provider�s Personal Finance Channel, is built on partnerships with some big players in the real estate market. Century 21, Intuit, Realtor.com, Apartments.com, and Countrywide Home Loans are all represented in the center, which directs interested parties to areas with catchy names like Looking, Selling, Renting, Moving, and Financing.
"It's not really anything new," said Adam Feuerstein, managing editor of the online real estate news service, Inman News Features.
"[Like] a lot of the search engines, they've realized there's money to be made by bringing these resources together," said Feuerstein. "Intuit, Countrywide, they all have their own Web sites where people can go and get the information.... This is therefore all about getting a wider distribution for those companies; and AOL can cash in by offering that."
Other than keeping its 11 million subscribers within AOL�s proprietary confines, it�s not clear how the online service provider will cash in, though. No details of the various deals with home listing or finance sites were disclosed.
Vernon Keenan, electronic commerce analyst at Zona Research said: "They're performing the function of an electronic concierge.... I think that moving forward, we're going to see the neo-online services such as Lycos, Excite, and that lot, along with AOL, being the real source for these kinds of things."
Indeed, Yahoo, Lycos, and Infoseek already offer real estate services; and dedicated players such as HomeNet, CyberHomes, and HomeScout likewise offer various combinations of listings, news, and financing information.
Of course, Microsoft is getting in on the action, too, with HomeAdvisor. Slated to premiere this summer - nearly a full year after Redmond revealed its real estate plans under the codename Boardwalk, HomeAdvisor is concentrating on code.
"A key differentiator for us, when you look at AOL or others, is that from the ground up we're building a product that integrates all the pieces of this large transaction," said Larry Cohen, group manager of HomeAdvisor. "Most people are bringing together information from lots of sources and slapping them together and calling them integrated; whereas we're building a product where, when you go from area to area, our product will be intelligent about what you're looking at."
The Microsoft site will include online lending applications, real estate listings, and apartment listings, mostly from partnerships with other data providers. Cohen could not comment on who those providers would be, but said they would be "category leaders."
For now, the Internet market seems to be dominated by Realtor.com which, as the official site for the National Association of Realtors, offers a broader range of home listings - some 1.1 million - and more detailed information about each home listed than most other sites.
Realtor.com will be where those who go "Looking" in AOL�s real estate center end up. Rob Shenk, director of programming for AOL�s personal finance area acknowledged that his company couldn't compete with Realtor.com's comprehensive listings.
"We decided that it's easier to support the Web site link [to Realtor.com] rather than build those listings ourselves," said Shenk.
News of the link from AOL came as a surprise to Richard Janssen, president of RealSelect Inc., which owns Realtor.com. Though Realtor.com has long had a co-marketing agreement with AOL's local directory service, DigitalCity, Janssen said early this afternoon that that arrangement did not extend to AOL's Real Estate Center. Later, Janssen recanted that statement.
"They are pointing to us right now," he agreed with a hint of surprise in his voice. "I guess we're flattered that they think this is a market big enough to interest them," he added.
Century 21 will also be featured prominently on the Looking area, allowing buyers to head straight to the salesmen in the mustard jackets if they so choose. Visitors looking for rentals will be sent to Apartments.com, an online listing of some 500,000 apartments.
And AOL will port Intuit's QuickenMortgage engine onto the center, allowing visitors to comparison shop for mortgages online in the Financing area. Content for the Selling and Moving sections will come from the likes of Intuit and AOL's own MoneyWhiz.
"We had a pretty modest real estate site," said Shenk, director of programming for AOL's personal finance channel. "This newer version offers great improvements. In particular, the listings play is far superior to what we had in the past."
As far as Century 21 is concerned, nothing has changed. The long-time cornerstone of AOL's Real Estate area, Century 21 continues to offer agent referrals and neighborhood information on the online service as part of the new agreement. "Our relationship is still the same," said Adam Karp, director of specialty markets and interactive marketing for Century 21. "It's a contract we're very happy with."
So what's new? Well, other than ads on prominent pages for Countrywide Home Loans, not much.
"It's not super-exciting from the frontiers of the e-commerce perspective," said Keenan, who referred to AOL's real estate site as little more than "brochureware."
And that may not be a bad thing - since the day when shopping for homes online replaces actual tours of the neighborhood and roof inspections still seems a bit distant.
