Dwellicious: The "Meta Bucket"

Greg Robertson will always be known to me as the guy who combined Fabio and an hourly cash drop (literally bills falling from the ceiling) in the eNeighborhoods booth at NAR a few years ago. Pure genius. I don’t think I’ve met Dan Woolley.

Now they are the Dwellicious Guys.

Dwellicious — which has received a lot of play in an out of real estate the past few weeks — is a social bookmarking application focused on property listings. User can save listings from a bunch of sites in one place. Every listing is complemented by data piped in through third-party APIs.

I really like this idea. Here’s why:

People start their home search online and browse for about two months before even contacting a Realtor.

The search process, particularly for younger users, is often collaborative.

Agents need a more efficient way of surfacing buyer preferences in this market.

Most sites have a less than all of the listings.

Home search is harder than it should be.

Dwellicious hits on all of these issues.

Think of it as a “shopping cart” for listings. This metaphor works really well even if we can’t complete it in the real estate transaction.

I have thought for some time that The “my account” feature on sites like Trulia, Realtor.com and other listings sites — long considered an ancillary utility — would emerge as a central piece of the online real estate experience, functioning as something of a home base online during the search process. You can see that many of these sites have put more effort into this feature lately.

The trouble with this is that the home base sits within the walls of one particular site. If users want to gather information from other places (a behavior we should expect according to NAR research) they need to throw it in another bucket or buckets.

Dwellicious is the meta-bucket.

For those of in the industry, this is something of a delicious irony. Listings aggregators threw an umbrella over brokers; Dwellicious, if it is adopted widely by consumers, does the same to the big listings sites, stepping in front of them as perhaps the first point of interaction.

We’ll see. The idea rocks. Building a user base is the tricky part. But these guys know what they’re doing.

— Brian Boero