Rising home inventories, falling house prices and tighter mortgage lending do not seem the ideal conditions to be launching a real-estate site.

But Alex Chang, chief executive of Roost.com, says it is the best of times.

Roost is a search engine in the “vertical” of real estate. It launched a month ago in 14 metropolitan areas of the US.

“In a tough market, [realtors] need to see more return on their dollar and become more efficient, while consumers are doing a lot more research, so this is a great time for us to be launching,” he insists.

Roost is inspired by another vertical search play – Kayak, which has been successful in aggregating travel offers. Roost’s board includes two Kayak directors and the San Francisco start-up also took advice from Kayak’s founder during its development.

Its interface is very intuitive. Users can type in the name of a town to bring up all properties for sale, then use sliders to adjust numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and other criteria to instantly narrow the search down.

As well as Roost.com, the company is incorporating its technology in brokers’ sites and earns money from clickthroughs to the agent’s details of the property.

It says it has an advantage over its San Francisco rival Trulia in having access to the MLS – the Multiple Listing Service that gives comprehensive coverage of new listings in an area.

Trulia has built up its database of 2m homes for sale by striking relationships with individual brokers, but Pete Flint, chief executive, says it is also starting to bring MLSs on board.

While Roost is focusing on pure search, Trulia also offers community features and advice for home buyers. He agrees it is a good time for the new wave of services like Roost, Trulia and Zillow.

“If you’re a consumer looking to buy, you have more questions than ever before,” he says.

With more than 3.5m unique users a month and traffic growing by more than 10 per cent a month, the chief executive says Trulia is by far the fastest growing site in the industry.

It has greater reach than Roost, but the newer site hopes to cover 30 to 40 per cent of the country by the end of the year and become another useful tool for buyers and sellers.

February 26th, 2008 in Internet | Permalink