Major Changes to Google’s Real Estate Listings

On Friday, Matt McGee reported in Search Engine Land that Google is building out a national real estate search engine.

In short, Google is now including every property listed in Google Maps within appropriate queries.

As of today, these listings seem to have rolled out to all “domicile”-type queries, such as “real estate”, “housing”, “apartments”, or “townhomes”. Oddly, they don’t seem to be coming up on the main SERP for any queries; you have to click on the Maps vertical search link.

Here are some screen shot examples:

I checked a number of listings for various cities. Naturally, I could not check them all, but it does not appear that any of the listings are coming up within Google Universal Search.

I can’t imagine that will stay the case. There’s very little traffic on those vertical engines (other than News and Images). If Google wants to drive traffic to those listings, they’ll have to blend them in with the main listings.

While the implications for realtors are not completely clear, one thing is for sure, “realtor” just went up in value as a search term.