Mi casa es Zoocasa?

Well, not exactly.

I got juicy little piece of information from Move Smartly:

There’s a new way to search for houses online in Canada, and it’s not Realtor.ca.

Zoocasa, a Canadian real estate search site backed by Rogers Communications Inc, is now online. The site is currently in Beta which is tech talk for “they’re not quite done yet”.
Zoocasa allows users to search for homes by neighbourhood and offers a very slick and intuitive user interface. Unfortunately the site appears to have just a fraction of the available listings in Canada. A quick search for Toronto reveals that they have roughly a third of all listings. Hopefully more brokerages will start feeding their listings to Zoocasa in the near future.

It seems that micasa and realtor.ca has a little friend coming to play in the park with them.
Online browsing getting more interesting.

Let’s just hope they maintain good behaviour and compliant to the Canadian Real Estate Association’s policy to stay in the game, like micasa has. And not run into the same problems as previous players.

After all, MLS has crushed upstarts before. Two Toronto-based sites, Realtysellers Ltd. and Realestateplus.ca, shut down in the past two years after run-ins with the Canadian Real Estate Association, which owns the MLS trademark. Housing123.com is accused of using its information without permission. ( The Globe and Mail )

After doing a search for Montreal properties, I was ecstatic to see that they actually have listings appearing in the results. So Montreal is game too.

We’ll be keeping an eye in the development of this site, and see it grow from there.

Best of luck Zoocasa team.

The MLS upgrades to Realtors.ca: website review

Much has been said about the upgrade of MLS.ca to Realtor.ca: Image mapping, user-friendly layout and over all, a better use of technology.

As Toronto Real Estate West describes:

On May 28th, 2008, MLS.ca will be introducing some new features to the web site on behalf of REALTORS® across Canada. The result will be an even better real estate resource, with more information about the properties displayed on the site.The first change will be the introduction of interactive mapping. You’ll be able to use Microsoft Virtual Earth software on the site to determine your search area, and to determine where a property is located. Interactive mapping will make it much more convenient to search traditional neighbourhoods or a specific region.The web site will also have a new streamlined text search. You’ll be able to input your initial search criteria without all of the details of an Advance Search. The site will still offer the detailed or Advance Search option, but also has a streamlined text version to make looking for properties even more convenient.There will be a new look, or design.

After reading all the hype about the new and improved website, one can only think that it would be a change for the better and that finally the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) had a good thing going for the home buyers and owners who browse the site. But it was only after a visit – and testing the new features – that you realize: apart from the interactive mapping, not much has changed.

Really.

Yes, the design is much better. But then again, we’re not there to see the pretty graphics. Are we?

The search function with interactive mapping, great addition. But stick to the location box on the top right hand side to find your area of interest, otherwise you’ll be clicking on that map for ever, until it gives you the right sector.

Now on to the Advanced Search:

Uh, not so advanced. Rather disappointingly simple.

First off, the form doesn’t give you a multiple choice box for the neighbourhoods. Instead, after choosing the province, you have to input the street and postal code. Which is fine, if you know exactly the street AND postal code of the area you are searching. But really, how many people you think can memorize these things? Honestly.

User friendly Advanced Search means you give as many options as possible so the user doesn’t get frustrated with the lack of them. Don’t have an exact street in mind? No problem, you can search by sectors.
In this particular case, I was looking into Old Montreal condos, but ended up with a list of properties from all over the island. Advanced? Not really.

Well, the new mapping function is definitely a plus. But there are still some of us out there that likes the old fashion: “input-as-much-detailed- information-as-possible” and get the results we want with one click of the “Search” button. Unfortunately, we are not there yet.

Hoping (fingers crossed) that they will soon announce a much-needed upgrade to the site, once again. It was a good start, but there is still much more room for improvement.