Goliath can go anywhere he wants. Now, he's decided house and apartment listings looks like a fertile plain.
Google's only getting started, says Peter Zollman, founder of Classified Intelligence, LLC.
He sells consulting services to newspaper companies desperately trying to hold on to their display and classifieds business. While he says Google Real Estate, drawing its data from four-month-old Google Base's well of "user generated" listings, is "nothing new," but it is a huge threat to publishers. He even wonders why it took Google months to adopt its own API tools to create such a mashup, when non-Googlers were doing so already.
"Google is a not a fly by night company," he told me in an interview. "They're a long term player."
Surprisingly, Zollman tells his clients to load their own classifieds into Google Base. "People care about results. They don't care if the sale came from the newspaper or a Web site, so if you care about your classified customers, you want to give them the widest distribution they can have," he said. Besides, if you're working with them you can see what they're up to, he reasons.
Zollman says the end game for classifieds - autos, houses, antiques, etc. - is pay for performance. In San Francisco, the housing listing game is over. "Craigslist.org is the only place. But in Washington, where the Post has grown its business through an aggressive online effort, it's doing well." It's up to publishers to flee or fight.
Here's my interview with Zollman.
While newspapers may be at risk for their classifieds business from Google's newest baby beta, Cendant Corp. and Ziprealty and HouseValues Inc., and Move.com have more at stake, according to David Jackson at InternetStockBlog.com."Improved information flow (of listings) will reduce inefficiencies in the market and ultimately cut brokers' commissions or eliminate them entirely," he wrote.
Henry Blodget at Internet Outsider says Google is still missing a big piece of the puzzle; offerings through the nation's local Multiple Listing Service databases.
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