Frontdoor.com just announced a pretty slick new feature to its website. On each of its roughly 4 million real estate listings, visitors now have the ability to choose from a dozen or so home styles and assign it to – or tag – the home.
Further, the tagging feature — where homes get pegged as Cape-Cods, Traditionals or Moderns after they have received a certain number of “votes” from the crowd — will then allow Frontdoor to offer users the ability to search by home style.
This feature will be added later this year – presumably after the database has had a chance to populate.
I dig this idea a lot, because I think it starts to bring the search experience much closer in line to the way that we look for homes in real life – by looking for and evaluating properties by what they actually look like.
[Full disclosure: 1000watt consulting has performed consulting services for Frontdoor.com in the past]
But what’s especially clever about this idea is that it’s a really practical application of the “wisdom of the crowds” idea. It taps into the collective intelligence of Frontdoor’s audience to complete a task that is uniquely suited to the human being – namely, to assign an architectural style to a photo of a building – one that is almost impossible for a machine or algorithm to replicate.
The only thing missing to me is that it feels like there could be more incentive (or reward) given for participation. Perhaps assigning or awarding Foursquare-like badges (“I’m a Modern home expert”) and building deeper interaction with users’ social graphs (“I think this home is a Cape-Cod, what do you think?”) would really press this home as a winner.
It seems, after a longish period of hibernation, Frontdoor is finally getting back in the game, Normally, we wouldn’t be highlighting this many feature launches back-to-back, but what with its launch of content widgets last week, and now this, Frontdoor seems to emerging from its slumber and innovating rather quickly.
Hopefully, it’ll spark some more of the same from its rivals.
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To be honest, I see very little to no value in this feature.
There are a few issues with this.
First of all I wonder how many people know the architectural styles? The articles on each style are a few clicks deep and then you can’t compare them to identify the right one. From usability stand point, it would be much easier to have a small image showing up when you hover over style name with a mouse. Otherwise, people won’t use it unless they can guess the style.
Second issue – listings get sold and expire. What a the chances for listings to get tagged with their respective style within 3 months of advertisement cycle?
Seems to me it’s one of those features that is doomed not be used and even if some one uses it, it won’t be useful just because the tagged content has a very short lifetime.
Or am I missing something?
I am with you Max. I don’t see it working as designed and I don’t see the value if it did work. I don’t think people trust the wisdom of the crowd for determining things of fact like house type. It is better suited for subjective feelings and opinions like “good deal” vs. “bad deal.”
Buyers go through everything in their price range and then just want their email alerts. There is not an overwhelming amount of inventory so tools like this end up being more work for the user to learn than just going through all of them. Also realtors have a phrase “buyers are liars” -because they start out thinking they have to have a cute bungalow and then they end up buying ranch home.
The SoCalMLS has a field called “style” and includes many relatively unknown descriptions (including “string”, “Beaux arts”, “conversion” “shotgun” “territorial” and “yurt”) on the list.
There is no verification of these selections by the listing agent, and I’ve seen 18-story-glass-high rise condos labeled as “Craftsman”!
Unless a panel of architectural experts are assigned the task of verifying these descriptions, I seriously doubt that anyone will really use this field to search by.
I agree with the other comments here. As an appraiser, I see errors on the MLS every day. A slab on grade rambler was once called a 2 story. The idea is a step in the right direction, but I seriously doubt it will work like the programmers at envision it.
I’ll be more impressed when your search lands on a page that has something of real value to potential buyers. All that realtor jargon is worthless to turning on a buyer. Stop thinking like realtors, and start thinking like potential buyers and give them what they need not just what realtors want them to have. We need buyers to call us because they fell in love with the home they saw online, not because we purposely don’t provide info just to get a phone call..