Onboard announced their new Lifestyle Listings Engine yesterday — you can see the overview here.

Onboard’s Lifestyle Listings Engine provides the first Human Centered Search (HCS) experience in real estate. Our flexible Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) combine technology and data in an easy-to-implement package that still leaves you with total freedom for design and creativity.  Our data specialists ensure that our data is accurate and up to date, while our engineers work hard to ensure that our HCS software applies the full range of Onboard’s industry-leading dataset to mimic the human search experience.

I’ve had the chance to speak with both Rob and Onboard’s CTO Liam Dyan while at Real Estate Connect this week in New York. The concept of giving buyers a tool that takes their lifestyle into account when searching for homes is certainly an interesting one. Currently, the research tools to find the neighborhood you want to live in and finding a specific home are separate. Sure, you can see neighborhood information quickly from most listing detail pages, but the order is backward — a buyer first searches for a neighborhood to live in, then finds a property. Not the other way around. Afterall, who really has time to look at all the listings in a city such as Seattle or Los Angeles? On one hand, I agree that many buyers who are relocating don’t have the faintest idea of what neighborhood they want to live in. On the other hand, the relocation market is not the majority of home buyers; and I believe many home buyers have a fairly good idea where they want to live (often close to where they currently live) and are just looking for that perfect house to come on the market at the right price. That said, I’ll have to reserve judgement until I see this search technology integrated into a real estate search interface.

What do you think? Are home buyers ready for a lifestyle search?