Google’s Home Listings Experiment Raises Industry Eyebrows

A home search test from Google has the real estate industry spooked.

The search engine earlier this week displayed home listings in its sponsored results for certain markets. The results allow interested buyers to view details about individual listings and request a tour with a buyer’s agent.

The listings are the result of a test run by an AI-enabled real estate brokerage HouseCanary to display listings and market its listing site, ComeHome, the company said on LinkedIn.

A spokesperson for Google called the search a “small experiment in partnership with ComeHome by HouseCanary that displays property listings and information alongside existing real estate agent ads on Google Search.”

The test expands on existing agent ads on Google by adding listing information, which is sourced from HouseCanary. The test is currently active in Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Denver, Chicago and the Bay Area, according to Google’s spokesperson.

News initially spread of the test when industry analyst Mike DelPrete posted screenshots to his website over the weekend. The Real Deal confirmed the test on a mobile browser by typing in “Home for sale Austin.”

In a blog post, WAV Group CEO Victor Lund said that the test was nothing more than using listings as paid advertising.

“When listings appear inside paid Google ads, they are being promoted, targeted, and monetized in a third-party environment that sits outside the IDX framework,” he wrote, referring to the Internet Data Exchange (IDX) policy that governs how MLS participants can share data.

The test also elicited a number of notes from investment analysts covering Zillow, which has seen its stock price fall around 10 percent today. In a note to investors, BTIG’s Jake Fuller said that “[p]lacement of the new carousel raises concerns [with] traditional paid & organic links bumped down the page.”

The test by HouseCanary has added another dimension to the debate over how listings can be displayed and marketed.

Zillow has long been the dominant player in home search, and reported 2.5 billion site visits in the third quarter. Other competitors have struggled to knock Zillow from its perch atop the industry, but the ability for Google to bypass those search engines could be an existential threat to platforms like Zillow or CoStar that rely on traffic to their web pages.

But Lund told The Real Deal that a Google-driven home search would blatantly run afoul of content-sharing agreements established by NAR and the MLS, which state that only members of a listing service can display another broker’s listings.

Lund pointed to a short-lived test run by Bing to display listings directly on its search results that sparked an outcry from industry leaders and was quickly aborted.

“I think it’s going to get shut down very quickly,” he said.

The home search landscape has faced significant turmoil this year as brokerages have challenged the status quo established over who controls how listings are displayed and marketed.

Compass and Zillow are in the middle of a legal fight over Zillow’s ability to ban listings from its site that aren’t uploaded within 24 hours of a brokerage or agent publicly marketing them.

Zillow has also been attacking Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED), the multiple listing service that serves much of the Chicago area, over its private listing network, claiming the network hurts transparency and can contribute to racial discrimination in the housing market (MRED has challenged those claims).