San Francisco — The people behind sites like Realtor.com, Redfin, and Trulia can breathe a sigh of relief and perhaps throw a party, as search engine behemoth Google last week abandoned its real estate listings on Google Maps, on the pile of failures along with Google Wave, Google Video, Google Web Accelerator… the list goes on.
Google real estate lets people find available properties for sale or for rent directly through Google Maps and segregate results by square footage and price, witnessed “low usage.”
The search engine leader last week said in an official Google blog: “In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API, we have decided to abandon the real estate feature within Google Maps by February 10, 2011,” said Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Earth and Maps.
Google Maps first introduced the real estate search feature in July 2009 was perceived as a significant threat to existing real estate sites. The feature was later modernized several times and introduced in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and the UK, signaling that Google was serious about helping people find homes (and exploring another revenue stream).
For a few years Google had an advantage over many real estate sites in terms of visibility, relying on listings uploaded by real-estate companies, considering that lots of people already used the company’s search engine and Gmail. The listings appeared alongside the map, allowing people to see photos of the property using Google’s Street View.
Google Maps feature is the latest in a string of experiments that have been abandoned. The last to go was Google Wave, which seemed like a genius idea when it launched, and promised much, but when it arrived, nobody could quite work it into their daily needs. Although several new products, such as Android, its mobile operating system, YouTube, its video site, and Chrome, a web browser, have been successful, none has yet generated revenues to match Google’s core search advertising business.
“At Google, one of our key principles is to take risks and to experiment,” said McClendon. He added that Google would “continue to explore this area”.
Google mentioned that it is not necessarily deserting the real estate market yet, stating in a blog post that “there might be better, more effective ways to help people find local real estate information than the current feature makes possible.”
The move is especially astonishing as real estate was frequently mentioned as a search vertical that Google likely wanted to double down on. Indeed, Google was so interested in this space in the past that it reportedly considered purchasing real estate search engine Trulia as recently as a year ago.
Rival online property services responded joyously to the withdrawal of Google as proof that more was required than simply a listing website to sell homes.
Moreover, the property portal market in the UK is monopolized by London-listed Rightmove, whose shares climbed more than 3 per cent following the news of Google’s withdrawal. Rightmove’s shares had slumped when news of Google’s plans to produce a rival online property service emerged in December 2009.
Analysts in the market had wondered whether Google would be able to make money from home searches, while there has been the challenge of maintaining an accurate national property database for a country the size of the US.
Sheraz Dar, marketing director at the UK’s Digital Property Group, which owns FindaProperty.com, Primelocation.com and Globrix.com, said: “Homehunters have a complicated and often comprehensive set of criteria when searching for a property, and as such need more information than a simple listing.”
Alex Chesterman, chief executive of Zoopla.co.uk said: “The enormous majority of consumers continue to use the leading portals as their online starting point for property search.”
Search Engine Land notes the comment of a U.K. real-estate company, PropertyPals.com, which said it saw “marginal traffic from maps” during its participation in the service, despite Google’s attempts to promote it across search results pages. But many high-level real-estate companies simply did not participate in that process, preferring to attract users to their own sites during the initial shopping process by simply relying on regular Google searches.
Rightmove stated that it had registered the busiest ever day for website traffic on Monday last week, the third successive Monday that the record has been broken. It said that the record “not only unveil signs of encouragement for the UK property market but also highlight a curious pattern of behavior in the way we look for property” in the post-weekend interest.
For now, the search engine giant has not disclosed any new moves in the field, either, hinting that it could be quite a while (or never) before it comes up with another novel idea and tries again.