Onboard and the Lifestyle Listings Engine
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?
Ira Monko
Posted at 11:28h, 08 JanuaryThanks Drew, I appreciate your perspective.
In addition to helping prospective home buyers understand which areas within a community best meets their needs, we are offer them the ability to identify which home within a community matches their lifestyle. For example we can help a young family with children find a home within 30 minutes commute to work, near parks/playgrounds, a variety of entertainment options, and safe neighborhood.
Subsequently based on the user interaction we are capable of providing more insight via enhanced leads to the broker/agent on their prospective home buyers and market.
Brian Tercero
Posted at 13:56h, 08 JanuaryI don’t think it is a question whether the consumer is ready for lifestyle searching, it is just a matter of actually having a technology company that can pull it off effectively.
The consumer is more then ready. Why? Because people buy homes based off emotion. They visualize themselves living there before they purchase, they picture themselves raising a family there.
Keeping lifestyle in mind is an essential part of shopping for real estate. People want to visualize their lives in a new home before a purchase. And unfortunately we are all still selling a picture, a virtual tour, and the basic stats. Buyers want more! Give it to them already.
On our new web site: http://www.prusantafe.com, we are trying to focus on lifestyle and make it a core focus of our site. It is rather difficult to pull off however because we are all still stuck in an old MLS system. Beds, baths and square footage; its only part of the equation! We need to evolve beyond that. How do you truly integrate what people dream for in a perfect house and be able to present that sales pitch online?
Its all about the amenities. Walking distance to stores, restaurants, schools, the views, being able to have horses, there are so many variables to play off of. The only way we can do that is if the data fields are added into our MLS data streams. Or another company pulls in the MLS data and aggregates the info with their own custom lifestyle database. Or goes rogue and builds their own database and let the listing agents feed you with the listings. My guess is they may have to do just that, getting an IDX feed from some MLS boards is ridiculously hard.
I just wish the MLS boards and providers were required to innovate and implement as quickly as all of us real estate companies that are in survival mode have to in this difficult market.
Its not a questions of if… its only a questions if it can be done properly.
I look forward to seeing the Onboard’s Lifestyle Listings Engine launched. I am hoping all involved have good success with their new product.
Mary Ann Knell-Peoria, IL Realtor
Posted at 14:19h, 08 JanuaryI would have to agree with Brian-I think home buyers will be more than ready for it so long as it can be implemented smoothly into real estate websites and search engines.
Margaret Safford-Metro Atlanta Realtor
Posted at 14:34h, 08 JanuaryWhat a wonderful feature a “lifestyle” search could be! I see this being great for people coming out of school and relocating. In our economy, there will soon be a huge number of laid off people relocating to take new jobs in less hit areas.
Hawaii real estate guy
Posted at 11:53h, 09 JanuaryI agree, consumers are interested in maintaining a certain lifestyle when searching for a home. It gets tricky implementing that into a search and keeping it SIMPLE. There are a lot of agents sites that have a standard IDX search that are hard to use and very confusing.
I would be interested to see how this can be implemented.
Dave Collins
Posted at 16:04h, 12 JanuaryThanks for the post Drew. Great to meet you at Inman.
In response to the relocation buyer. Imagine the additional ability to do a lifestyle search not by the neighborhood you want to be in, because as you point out that would be difficult, but predicated on the neighborhood you currently live in. Just like we take our current community data and provide community comparisons, within this search you could potentially build it out to ask for the customers current county, zip, town or neighborhood and then show them comparable neighborhoods in the new location.
Imagine…
Liam Dayan
Posted at 15:48h, 13 JanuaryI appreciate the good word, Drew. Brian, you’ve exactly put your finger on it by saying that right now property search is completely disconnected from the emotional context of finding and buying a home.
Take your site, for example. Clean interface, engaging, clearly about engaging the buyer on an emotional level (even the color scheme)–right up until you try to do any kind of meaningful search. This isn’t a knock on you at all, Brian, because you’ve done a great job with what’s available. The problem is that what’s available for search is just not that great.
We think we’ve found ways to solve that, and the general consensus at Real Estate Connect seemed to be that we were headed in the right direction. If we can help RE create compelling user experiences that result in meaningful searches that start genuine conversations between broker/agents and their consumers–everybody wins.
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