General search engines like Google are great, but sometimes a more specialized search engine will get the job done much better. That’s the idea behind a new search engine that launched on Wednesday – Roost, a real estate search engine.
Roost differs from many of the more established home buying sites in that they are primarily focused on search, and is not supported by advertising (we’ll see how long that last part lasts though). In addition to that, Roost claims a comprehensive database and lightning fast results.
To make this work, Roost partnered up with Multiple Listing Services in 12 U.S. cities. Their goal is to attract prospective home buyers with a large number of listings. Clicking on a “more information” link on any of Roost’s listings takes you directly to the real estate agent’s site. The agents pay for the traffic and Roost creates the sites for the real estate brokers, which may often lead to new customers. There are also options to filter your search results by various criteria, including neighborhood, school district, and so on.
Right now Roost is labeled as being in beta version and Roost explains plans to expand, so we can forgive them for the lack of markets for now. Other than that, there aren’t too many downsides to the search engine, but one can’t help but wonder if yet another specialty real estate search engine is needed.
