UK property search engine Dothomes is expanding its range of coverage to now include the lucrative U.S. market. Slightly less than two years after the initial founding of the search engine, the site’s parent company, BytePlay, indicated that they were ready to launch a concerted effort to break into the US market and challenge established rivals.
With more than 450,000 listings, Dothomes lays claim to being amongst the largest British property search websites. Furthermore, they now claim to have become a market leader in South Africa.
Unlike many of their competitors, Dothomes does not require real estate agents to cooperate with them in order to compile its database. Instead, Dothomes links back to the original listings. It works much in the same fashion as a regular search engine, such as Google, whereby they send out their robots to crawl real estate websites to establish their listings.
While I’m all about competition, and subscribe to the belief that “competition breeds excellence”, I can’t help but to continue to wonder how many of these sorts of sites we actually need. It was just last week that I announced the launch of another property search engine – Roost.