Yahoo Real Estate: it's Creeping into Organic + APIs Improve its Functionality
Yahoo revised its real estate page with map and local APIs and gave its web search a real estate short cut:

websearch:
"you can now find up-to-date local mortgage rate information directly within web search"
Yahoo real estate:
"home valuation shortcut and local real estate search shortcut for ‘[city] real estate’ queries (ex: ‘san Francisco real estate’)."
Yahoo Local and Map APIs:
users can read reviews of schools and figure out drive times to potential residences

(check Yahoo's Searching for Mortgage Rates and Real Estate)

To give you a feel for the importance of this move read Greg Sterling: "Depending on whom you consult, Yahoo! Real Estate falls somewhere in the top ten most visited online real estate properties."

Greg Sterling also notes that: "In my quick and unscientific review of [7 real estate] sites I found the new Yahoo! site to be one of the best user experiences (Trulia was the other but didn’t have as many features.)."

I'm not super familiar with the online real estate marketing space, but this looks like a pretty big deal to me in terms of a layering of appropriate technologies that will make the residence-finding process much easier. This realtor real estate company marketer who follows online real estate in his blog thinks so too: Yahoo Real Estate Delivers A Better Search Experience. (his company has a deal with Yahoo though...)

It's interesting to note the creep of Yahoo Real Estate results into Yahoo's main SERPs. It echoes the Google Base creep and, like Base, will be canabalizing paid search and organic result click throughs.

Unlike most of the Base advances I've seen though Y! Real Estate is a strong, well integrated and mostly-separate-from-SERPs tool.

Real Estate marketers - if you're not already in Yahoo, get there now! This improvement will drive its usage enormously. They provide users with residences for rent as well as purchase.

Other Coverage:
Yahoo Revamps Real Estate Site
Yahoo Searches For Mortgage Rates
Yahoo Real Estate new website and Flickr geotagging
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |