New Search Engine for New Home Buyers

Look out MLS, there is a new online database vying for the attention of home buyers. Zoocasa announced its presence with a press release last Thursday.

Calling itself “a smarter way to find the perfect home online”, Zoocasa touts its interactive map, strong filtering tools, and ability to send alerts based on your saved search criteria. It also allows you to monitor properties and search only the new listings that have appeared since you last visited.

An innovation that Zoocasa offers is its “Research” tab, which provides an overview of the community you are searching, including the range of house prices and a description of the community, pulled from Wikipedia. Relying on Wikipedia for research can be a bit risky, but one can assume that the entries for cities and towns are relatively accurate. There are discrepancies in information though, as large cities contain huge volumes of data while smaller places, like tiny Hartland, N.B or Egmondville, Ontario (home to a major participant in the 1837 rebellion!) contain nothing.

Overall, Zoocasa seems to have some good ideas, but a few simple searches show that there may be some kinks to work out in its search tool. The neighbourhood text search they promised returned nothing for the area selected in our test, while the MLS neighbourhood search returned several properties. A search for “Oakville” found properties in neighbouring Mississauga and Burlington.

The interactive map is cool – using Google’s satellite maps you can choose to include points of interest relative to the property you have selected. Listings here lack the property details and pictures that MLS users are accustomed to, but they do provide links to the real estate agent’s original online listing.

When it comes to online property searching, MLS is still the champ, but the fact that someone else is in the game is a great thing for new home buyers.