There has been a lot of buzz over the past month on the real estate blogs about a new home search bookmarking site, Dwellicious. On the face, I was nonplussed. I didn’t immediately grasp the value and, even after watching their demonstration at the Inman Real Estate Connect conference last week, I wasn’t sold. Then while out showing homes this past weekend it hit me like a ton of day-old biscuits.
I have long been saying that I need an aggregator for my aggregators. Mostly, I was thinking about social networking and the overkill of online opportunities to connect, most of which are quickly forgotten by me the moment I complete the sign-up process. I now use so many web resources in my business that I tend to forget where I put them all.
Our clients undoubtedly find that they have the same problem with home searches. Most recently, while I was traipsing through homes with a client, homes he had found online, I asked which sites he was fancying these days. Not surprisingly, he said that he is all over the place; he doesn’t park on one search site but uses several. This, we know, is smart window-shopping, because few sites offer the full menu of inventory. But how is he to remember where he put all of those houses? This is where Dwellicious comes in.
Sign-up is free. I have a link at the bottom of the right side bar here. Once you have your account, you are able to drop a Dwellicious bookmark tab into your browser. At that point, wherever you happen to be when you find a “live one,” you simply click on the bookmark and the home is dropped into your Dwellicious folder. Multiple listings from multiple sites can all happily cohabitate — one big, happy family. Click on any of your listings in the future and you are redirected to the mothership, the originating site. It’s pretty cool.
Currently, Dwellicious supports only the following sites, which is unfortunately a big limitation (and hopefully a short-term one):
- century21.com
- coldwellbanker.com
- craigslist.ca
- craigslist.org
- cyberhomes.com
- frontdoor.com
- har.com
- homes.com
- homesdatabase.com
- realtor.com
- redfin.com
- remax.com
- rentals.com
- trulia.com
- yahoo.com
- zillow.com
Fortunately, you can request that other sites be enabled to work with their bookmarking, and I have done just that for a San Diego favorite, www.SDlookup.com. I will also be investigating the possibility of adding the search platform from our own web site to their list of supported sites. In the meantime, Dwellicious is a work in progress.
There is other fun stuff, too. You can share your shopping cart with friends, and you can post your wish-list to Facebook and Twitter, but I find this is just window dressing and completely beside the point. The real value is in organizing your search experience.
If you are a consumer, I would love to know what you think. Gimmicky or brilliant? Inspired or a passing fad? For me, the jury is out, but I do see potential.
