Jarod and I are looking to buy a house in the inner west. Nothing special – just a 2 bedroom thing that hasn’t got structural issues and has a bit of backyard if we’re lucky.
As such, we’ve spent countless hours looking through domain.com.au and realestate.com.au and countless hours bitching about the aforementioned websites. I guess why bother developing your offering when you have no competition?

Silly things like:
- ‘I searched for house, and it’s bringing up apartments.’
- ‘I put in the max $ amount and it’s going heaps over.’
- ‘I told it I’m searching in NSW and it’s asking me if I want to look at Enmore in QLD or Enmore in NSW.’
- ‘It thinks Homebush is in the inner west!!’

Then the functionality. There is limited functionality around marking houses of interest, or houses that you’re totally uninterested in. If you want to view more photos for a place you have to click into the listing. It thinks ‘Virtual Tours’ are the same photos displayed stitched together. (Although this could be the fault of the real estate agents). And searching for ‘houses’ means nothing, as you get apartments, land and everything else thrown in.

In this new world of the internet, you would have thought someone would have come along and made it better. Jarod and I were theorising on what we would do if we were to build a new real estate search engine (not that we could) and there were many things to improve on.

Today, I stumbled across an alternative. And they’ve incorporated some of the functionality we had thought of (idea stealers!).

Homehound.com.au with the tagline of ‘your best friend in real estate’, offers things that I like:
- You can mark properties as ‘viewed’
- You can save them and then add notes to your saved properties (and view them all on one map!)
- You can choose not to see properties with no price, or properties for auction
- You’re not forced to register for the site if you’d like an email subscription with new properties
- A map is displayed in conjunction with the search results
- You can view all of the images available within the search results
- In the listing, there is a little option which is brilliant: ‘Was the information provided here useful? Yes | No’

The only downside is that it doesn’t seem to be updated by the agents nearly as often as the other two — there were houses listed which I know have already sold, but still, it’s a good move in the right direction.

Of course, we’ll probably have to keep an eye on domain/realestate to ensure we don’t miss anything, but I’m certainly going to use it as my main search engine.

Tags: buy, buying, domain.com.au, homehound.com.au, house, inner west, real estate, realestate.com.au
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