Looks like they did not get into legal isues so far so thye may be covered on that front.

Thanks for the post, and for your thoughts. Always appreciated.

Jessie, likewise, thanks for the comment.

Let me rather crudely attempt some clarification.

DotHomes offers brokers free and effortless leads directly to their own listings on their own sites. We do not include the MLS listings which are to be found on any broker’s site for which that broker is not specifically the listing broker. And, we do not host any listings. We link directly, and without any charge, to the original listing on the listing broker’s site.

Given this, as Todd mentions in his last comment, it seems more than a little peculiar to think that any broker might want to opt out. We drive leads to listing brokers. We do not charge. And, we certainly do not drive traffic to any broker’s site to view listings for which the particular broker is not specifically the listing broker. To our thinking, and please forgive any ignorance, it seems that DotHomes provides only upside for listing brokers. There’s no cost, no effort, and non-listing brokers cannot usurp leads from listing brokers – as other services permit.

So, from our end, this doesn’t really seem to be a legal matter (though, having taken legal council, we confess: we do believe that, in this particular instance, the law is on our side*). The service we provide is supposed to be pro broker, and we’ll be looking to work with the brokers ad infinitum with a view to continually improving our service – to help them improve their business.

As regards quantity of listings, we’ve just launched. We have just over a million listings currently, and this number will be increasing on a daily basis. Do we believe that we can reach the levels of coverage of Realtor.com? We’ll let time but the judge of that. But, I’ll admit that, from a purely technical perspective, we’re cautiously optimistic that this can be done, and that it can actually be done relatively quickly.

Amy Le, in answer to your comment, we can all cite metrics whereby we’re the greatest, and whereby we have fantastic traction. Our UK service has won several awards: http://www.byteplay.com/blog/company . I’m sure your US service has done equally well. I wish you everything of the best in your endeavours.

Thanks again.

The more feedback the better. We’re looking to learn, and to work with the industry.

Hope all’s well.

Best wishes,

Douglas

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* Copyright concerns need to be considered on a case-by-case basis. The questions to be asked:
(1) In what specifically is copyright supposed to vest?
(2) Who precisely is the copyright holder?
(3) How, specifically, is some service supposed to be infringing on said copyright?
(4) What specifically are the damages which are supposed to be associated with the service provision?

As far as fair use, de Jager told me there would be an opt out feature, so I doubt they will challange the objection of a broker. But if they did, I think they would win. I’ve been on the opposite side of a fair use challenge, and the law is surprisingly liberal.

At this point, one would have to wonder why any broker would want to. It’s one thing for a buyer’s agent to repost listings, but any properly credited distribution of content that is already on the Internet has very little downside to an agent.

Excellent points and one very close to home for us. I agree that the the Trulia & Realtor don’t provide a real search engine experience of being totally transparent, just based on their revenue models. These are really just real estate advertising platforms with a search engine function.

The goal of these is as you say to possibly delay and wow the user with sticky features so that they can sell advertising.

Although I also think dothomes may face some issues of what “fair use” is with the combination of photos, description, address and price.

In my early review of the site it seems that they are getting the listings from 3 main sources c21, era and coldwell with some sprinkles from other sources like Alain Pinel according to Kevin http://3oceansrealestate.com/blog/dothomes-is-yet-another-real-estate-search-site.html#comment-139751

As they get more listings the task of managing all the listing data may get very difficult. Although this model is good for savy web pro’s like you do you think that consumers are ready to be retrained on how to search real estate?

Quality is one of those unknowns. How fast the listing shows up is really only important to a seller or their agent. Buyers aren’t going to know the difference. How fast DotHomes updates things like price changes will be interesting to watch. Google comes and finds my content just minutes after I post it. Maybe some sort of pinging technology will need to happen.

However, the quantity argument doesn’t fly in my eyes. It would, maybe, if any of Realtor.com’s competition could come anywhere close in terms of the numbers of listings they provide. But even then, Realtor.com does not have FULL coverage of all listings.

At launch, Dot Homes is already in the mix, when it comes to the other guy. However, they are the only model that is positioned to have even a fighting chance at out-listing Realtor.com because they are the only player who doesn’t utilize the same business practice of counting on agents (or their feeds) to come to them.

Joel Burslem, from Future of Real Estate Marketing blogs about Dothomes today and brings up some good points about the quanity and quality issue that Dothomes will have with their method.

That’s not exactly what any true search engine does. They look at you data, take what only can be described as “fair use”, and direct traffic back. DotHomes is only using data that is already publicly displayed on the web, so I really don’t think any MLS can really do anything about it.

The beauty of their system is that they really don’t need cooperation from the real estate base. DotHomes’ clients are mortgage originators, insurance agents, and anyone else who might want to advertise there.

I recently came to Homescape.com as their resident blogger and editorial producer. With my news journalism background, I bring consumer driven content to the site and spend much of my day surfing the Net and reading blogs like Lenderdrama. I comepletely agree with you about Dothomes business model. On the surface the model looks really great. But due to current industry limitations on how listings are permitted to be displayed, Dothomes will face many legal questions to come. Until the industry and all MLS opens the doors to complete free use of their data, Dothomes will be scraping for content as any other search site.

I agree that content is king. What makes DotHomes different, is that they have a business and technology model that can eventually put them in the lead. Like I said before, we’ll have to watch over the next year or so to see how that pans out.