It's common knowledge that looking for a house online is an endless maze instead of a streamlined experience - and Homes.com is looking to change that. The platform has undergone a recent overhaul with their site rebuilt from scratch by Grow, the digital agency, to make house hunting a more efficient and less arduous process while personalizing and streamlining it. Now, it's even mobile-friendly, and the search overhaul is catered to the people-element of finding your dream home.
Love a certain look? The new Homes.com Snap & Search BETA feature offers the first national visual search tool for homebuyers. Upload a photo of the house down the street you've always admired, a dream home you found on Pinterest or Instagram or any image from your phone or computer, and the artificial intelligence returns local listings with a similar architectural style, or exterior finish, using machine learning algorithms analysis of 100's of millions of property images.
Tired of wasting time browsing through properties that don't quite hit the mark? Just tell the site which amenities are "must have" and which are "nice to have" when you start your search, add other preferences like your desired schools, and the new Homes.com Match will assign a "Match" score to each home in your results based on those parameters. It will also clearly show which "must-have" criteria match and which don't. Results are sorted based on your personalized "Match" score, delivering the best matches first to help you prioritize. You can't do this on any other home search site.
Looking for an easy way to share and collaborate on listings of interest with your partner, parents, friends or agent? With the new Homes.com HomeShare, you can save your favorite listings, add notes, and message back and forth about specific homes with anyone you choose. You can also create multiple share lists based on variables such as all the homes you visited in a specific area, collaborate on notes, insert comments and vote a thumbs up/thumbs down on each shared property to easily identify the listings you love.
Other new, smarter-way-to-search features unique to Homes.com include:
Search like you think - From the moment you start your search, the experience is more personal. Instead of searching by city or zip code and returning hundreds of irrelevant listings, the home page offers a conversational approach - tell Homes.com what matters most, just as you'd tell a friend or trusted advisor.
Fewer clicks to see house details – With just one click from the search results pages, you'll see a complete image gallery, Google street and satellite views, and your search criteria "Match" score. You can also save favorite homes to HomeShare with just a tap, all without leaving the search results. It's a faster and simpler way to separate the "maybes" from the "nos."
More descriptive search results – Instead of displaying search results by address-only headings, Homes.com uses artificial intelligence to automatically create a headline that highlights the standout features of each listing. The headline descriptions make it easier to scroll through the possibilities and quickly eliminate those that don't appeal.
'Around' price results – Included with your "must haves" and "nice to haves" are homes that cost "around" the price you specify. You'll never miss a maybe-perfect-for-you home again just because it's listed a little above or below your target price.
"We've spent many months reimagining Homes.com from the ground up to make it simpler, smarter, faster and more fun for people to search for their next home," said David Mele, president of Homes.com. "The result is a completely new, ultra-personalized search experience that combines elements of Pinterest, Facebook, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and collaborative search. It's a smarter design that will help both home shoppers and their agents streamline the process of finding the perfect home."
SOURCE Homes.com
Edited by K. Fanning
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