This is a story of how blogging could bring you fame and fortune. Well, maybe not exactly, but at least it brought me some recognition. Last Friday I received a call from a woman asking me about one of my blog posts. We talked about it, telling me that she represented the new US website Dothomes, which is a new search engine for home buyers. I say “new”, but DotHomes has already established itself in the United Kingdom and South Africa. She surprised me by asking if I would like to speak to one of the site founders. My first thought was why me?, but my next thought was to say yes as quickly as possible, so I was fortunate to have a conversation this morning with Douglas de Jager.

We are certainly in an unusual time for real estate. More consumers are heading on line to find homes, real estate professionals, or just simply information. Venture capitalists have been wondering about funding internet start ups, and there are worries about if a site will even last. However, reports also show that there are declining dollars for television and print advertising, but the internet advertising budgets are remaining in place. Certainly, we real estate professionals have to be wise about our advertising this year, and we have to keep our eyes open to how consumers are using the internet medium. This led me to look at various sites that we are familiar with like Zillow and Trulia, but new sites are opening up. I, for one, think it is in our best interest to follow what is happening on the net, so I was happy to have the chance to speak to a founder of such a site.

DotHomes has a Google like feel in its look and use. Home buyers can type in their search term, and the most appropriate results are displayed along with a map and relevant data. Advertising will appear on the right hand side of the screen. If you are feeling adventurous, you can hit the “I'm feeling wealthy” button to view the more expensive offerings for your search term. Like Google, DotHomes crawls sites to find home listings. The criticism that has been laid at this sites doorstep has been that they are not familiar with the US real estate market, and that they are not offering a complete number of listings. My conversation began with these issues.

I found his answers honest and intelligent. I was wondering how much he might know of real estate transactions in the US, but he quickly dispelled any notion that he did not comprehend it. As he was giving me the statistics of homes listed on his site and others, I was surfing the web. I had opened up Trulia, Zillow, and Dothomes in three browsers. I typed the same search phrase into all three. DotHomes did not have as many listed as the others, but the list was impressive. As my survey of the sites continued, he impressed me with his confidence that his site will eventually master having more complete listings by developing the best search possible. This caused me to ask if agents can directly submit a listing to his site. In an effort to find the best way to serve our market, DotHomes is working on accepting submissions to crawl a site for listings. You will information on how to do this on the About Us section on the home page. I wondered about FSBO sites. They will only be concentrating on agent sites. I liked the fact that throughout the conversation he realized that the site would have to be flexible in finding its way here. The coming months should really see improvements which will help the consumer, so for now they are researching how to best accomplish this fact.

Agents do have the option of submitting a video clip of their listing, which can be done from your cell or computer. I wanted to know how could agents better use his site to reach the consumer. Currently, the other option is through ad placement, which they will handle in house. They are still working on some details for this service, but I was impressed by the idea of offering different targeting options. Your ads could place for certain income level targets for example. They will not being using ads from Adsense or AdCenter. Here again, Mr. De Jager demonstrated that he had done his homework about the market conditions for advertising, citing examples from UK sites, and showing how these could apply to the US.

I saw that on their UK site that they had a statistics page, which had good information on it, and they had a home value estimator, so I was wondering if they would be adding features to the US site. In particular, I noticed that the site has a humorous touch, so would that be the way that they could get consumers to come back to the site. Naturally, he could not give away their plans, but he said that they definitely wanted to make the site useful for the consumer, and that finding a fun way to do this was important to them.

This may not seem like the best market time to launch a new site devoted to real estate, but I came away from this talk that DotHomes is fully prepared to handle this market, and that it is worth checking out. If you are an agent, you may wish to see that your site is crawled by them, and you probably should take advantage of the uploading video option. Video sites are becoming the most visited, and it just might make the difference to home buyers. If you are a consumer, I feel that you will be presented with information in an easy to understand format. For either group, please visit http://www.dothomes.com to check it out for yourselves.