There are currently three ways to access real estate on Yahoo! You can go to the search engine at yahoo.com and key in your keywords like "homes for sale." You can go to Yahoo!'s yellow pages and look up real estate, and you can go to Yahoo! Real Estate.

To date, Yahoo! Real Estate is positioned as little more than an afterthought on the world's largest online directory and busiest front page. You have to scroll down to the bottom of the page so far that by the time you got to the bottom, it's easy to forget what you were looking for. Oh, yeah - real estate.

But that's going to change with an aggressive new lead generation program by Yahoo! Real Estate producer Ryan Roslansky. According to Roslansky, Yahoo! Real Estate is being groomed as an important new source of revenues for the advertising-dependent corporation.

When did Yahoo! change its mind and decide to make real estate a priority? As soon as the company started charging for listings submissions from agents, putting gel in the mold of its business model. While the company won't share its results, they are apparently good enough to make directors sit up and take notice. Suddenly, real estate is one of the six most important priorities for corporate Yahoo!, a spokesperson told Agent News. So market commentators, analysts, investors and future customers - here's your heads up. Real estate ad sales and subscriptions will be an important benchmark to watch in 2002 if you're interested in Yahoo!.

What does Yahoo!'s new marketing strategies for Realtors mean? Find out in this exclusive interview with Roslansky and Agent News publisher Blanche Evans.

B.E.: What is Yahoo! Real Estate?

R.R.: It's a subset of classifieds. If you want to see classified ads, they are divided into sections - autos, careers, and real estate. We are a subset of larger classifieds covering rentals and homes for sale.

B.E.: Agents are interested in getting exposure for themselves and their listings. How do they get exposure on Yahoo! Real Estate?

R.R.: Yahoo! Real Estate is comparable to Homeadvisor and Homestore in that we aggregate services. We have nearly one million listings that we get from various sources like Homes and Land magazine and some MLS organizations, and direct from the brokers and agents themselves.

B.E.: Do you pay MLSs for listings?

R.R.: No, Yahoo! does not pay for listings.

B.E.: So, wait a minute. How do you make money? Do the brokers and agents pay?

R.R.: They can put listings on the classified platform, and we aggregate them together, and we have a great search interface.

For individual users who want to post a listing there is a fee - an agent would come to Yahoo! depending on where they want to post, and they pay $24.95 to $49.95, and for that price they get 21 days of exposure for listing on Yahoo! Real Estate.

B.E.: But an agent might say, I can post for free to HomeAdvisor and my MLS posts my listings free to Homestore. Why is Yahoo! worth the money?

R.R.: We have such a tremendous reach, we have agents telling us they have value from our service. We equate it to offline classifieds. They don't have a problem paying $30 for three lines of text in the newspaper. On Yahoo!, they can put their contact information, virtual tours, as much information as they want. We reach a large audience - 219 million unique users a month. And, we give them a URL for their listing.

B.E.: How many consumers come to real estate channel?

R.R.: We don't release that monthly number. It is a policy from Yahoo! corporate.

B.E.: Yeah, but you're saying that you provide value. Other portals release their traffic, and they don't charge to post the listing. How do they know what they are buying? Wouldn't a customer want to know that they could get five times the exposure on Yahoo! as another site?

R.R.: It's a corporate policy. We are the first to tell them to be everywhere they can possibly be.

B.E.: There have been tremendous changes in online real estate aggregators in the past 12 months - bankruptcies, scandals, failed IPOs, and Yahoo! just quietly chugged along. Are you happy with where you are, or do you see opportunity in the shake-out?

R.R.: We have found the model for how real estate will act in the future on the Internet. Homestore and Homeadvisor created a precedent that you can put listings on for free and then upsell agents to other products. We see offline classifieds moving online, and we think that is the best space the model is built on. In the past real estate was not a priority, and we are announcing that the listing group is one of the top six priorities. We'll get more attention and money from the company.

B.E.: But the listings-centric model didn't necessarily work because many agents complained that they don't get leads on the Internet.

R.R.: We have a network to leverage. If you type in 'homes for sale,' the results are from the Yahoo! search engine and it will say check out Yahoo! Real Estate. We have a search engine, Yahoo! and a destination portal - Yahoo! Real Estate.

B.E.: How can agents get found on the search engine?

R.R.: At yahoo.com, consumers can key in key words like 'Atlanta real estate' or 'homes for sale,' and the results will be two-fold. We're going to show you a link that says Yahoo! has a real estate portal and here are the relevant sites that you can find that you can go and search. The real estate search would be inside Yahoo!. To be found on the search engine, go to www.businessexpress.yahoo.com where you'll be shown about that program. For $299 the Yahoo! editorial team will review your site.

B.E.: So if real estate is going to be a priority, will you have some packages for Realtors to make it easier for them to use your site?

R.R.: We have plans in the future to bundle packages for real estate professionals that will be announced in a while.

B.E.: Are you getting into the Web site design business?

R.R.: Not as it is. If you were to look across the Yahoo! network, we also own Geocities where agents can create their own Webpage. If Yahoo! Real Estate were looking to grow its offering, we have the tools - Yahoo e-mail, the search engine, agent directory, and instant messaging - to bundle all those together.

B.E.: When?

R.R.: That's not determined yet. What's going to happen is our priorities are to continue to explore the options and grow our content and services, within the portal itself. To provide consumers with the best content, so if you come, you will see that we have the best partners giving the best resources. Consumers are going to start their search at Yahoo!, and we are going to direct them to our partners. Your site is only valuable if you have a large reach.

B.E.: What makes you so sure that your plan is going to work?

R.R.: Because we have thought of it from the agent's perspective. I was the son of two real estate brokers, and I am also an agent. We make decisions from that side of the spectrum. A lot of companies made the mistake that they didn't know how the market worked for an agent. We do.

Published: January 18, 2002

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