DotHomes, the UK-based real estate search engine which now covers the US, UK and South Africa, says it has doubled its number of nationwide real estate listings in the US, bringing its database up to two million residential properties for sale and rent. By contrast, Yahoo Real Estate, Roost, Trulia and Zillow (and others) get feeds from brokers and MLS services in the US. But DotHomes reckons it is now neck and neck with Trulia on the number of homes it has in its database just by crawling the Web. That’s good but it needs more marketing partners if it’s to become better known in the US, hence it is now out on the WebMission trip to Silicon Valley looking for some.
From a natural language search, DotHomes generates direct links to the original source of information – the listing agent/broker – by sending out Google-like spiders to crawl sites. This is not a trivial matter given that it has to deal with forms, javascript and content on the page that that varies when the URL stays the same.
DotHomes is funded by three of Europe’s leading early-stage venture capital firms: The Accelerator Group; Arts Alliance; and Samos Investments.