The jumbled scrapheap of real estate search

This is what real estate search looks like today. A swath of digital earth where every square inch is occupied.

Chassis of search refiners stacked high. Drive train piles of lead generation forms. Huge containers filled with the nuts and bolts of options. Content fan belts. Hubcap API’s. And heat map fuel tanks filled with gobs of data that seep all over the user’s drip pan.

We know all the arguments that support this. Heck, we’ve published dozens of them ourselves. And we continue to find ourselves thinking about what else we can layer into search.

Today however, we asked ourselves a different question. Is this really the right path forward for real estate?

Are monumentally comprehensive and expanding search experiences helping consumers or are they quite possibly hindering their ability to find and discover the home they want to live in?

We understand the issues. We can’t argue with analytics. We won’t discount the conversation results.

But today, during a break, sitting in the brand new Black Label Starbucks a few blocks from the office we spent time playing with this app. By setting one criteria and shaking the phone, it produced incredible results. Surprise results.

We lit up.

What if real estate search were this easy? What if real estate search could be incredible? Surprising. Discoverable. Different. Untangled from all the junk we’ve layered on to it.

What if.

We can easily conjure up all the arguments against this idea. But what good would that do us. Or you. We think, good might come if we could create a search result that look much more like this.