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August 28, 2006

Searching for Mortgage Rates and Real Estate

Hi folks, we just launched a redesign of Yahoo! Real Estate. As part of this you can now find up-to-date local mortgage rate information directly within web search. Go to Yahoo! and search for '[your city] mortgage rates' (ex: Santa Clara mortgage rates).

Mortgage DD 8.22.png

The new shortcut displays three of the most popular loan types along with their daily rates and the week-over-week trend. The shortcut also has links to view nearby individual lender rates as well as state mortgage rate trend graphs. If you're looking for a mortgage type that is not displayed, you can click the 'More mortgage rates' link for additional loan types. You can also select the 'Calculate payment' link to figure out your monthly payments and amortization schedule for your desired loan amount.

Now seems like a good time to bring you up to date on some additional Yahoo! Real Estate search shortcuts such as the home valuation shortcut and local real estate search shortcut for ?[city] real estate? queries (ex: ?san Francisco real estate?). This shortcut helps users narrow their search and easily access local homes for sale by linking directly to MLS listings in the area in which they are searching.

SF Homes Shortcut 8.22.png

The newly launched site also features a brand new design that leverages the Yahoo! Maps API with satellite imagery, and the Yahoo! Local API, both of which are available to the public.

With the new design, you can easily browse homes on a map and plot nearby points of interest such as schools, grocery stores, parks, and restaurants; many of which feature user reviews from Yahoo! Local. The site also allows you to research local market conditions such as an area's housing inventory, median price, price trends, mortgage rates, and rate trends.

We hope these new features add breadth of service, usability and value to the more than 3 million home listings and existing real estate services Yahoo! offers. If you are looking to do some research, buy or sell, check out the new site and let us know what you think!

Vivek Gupta
Senior Engineering Manager, Yahoo! Real Estate

Carlos Teran
Product Manager, Yahoo! Real Estate

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Comments

Not bad. Now if you integrated some of the additional features of Zillow, then that would be ideal.

Posted by: Christian Cadeo | August 28, 2006 08:40 PM

any plans for an international release?

Posted by: Harvey | August 29, 2006 04:09 AM

Searching a radius by city is a little flaky. In my area, typing in a small city and then searching for homes within 25 miles included a listing over 200 mi. away. Picking 15 didn't work quite right, either. 5 and 10 seemed to work OK. Oddly enough, searching by the zip code instead worked fine.

What's the point of being able to change EVERYTHING in the left sidebar except the city? The only way I could get this to work decently for me was to pick one village at a time (I'm searching in the country) and limit my search to a 5-10 mi. radius. Once I changed the city, I had to go back to the left side, re-check the box to include forclosures as well, and then select '10 miles' again. That shouldn't be necessary.

I like the idea though- just needs a little bit of tweaking yet.

Posted by: n | September 2, 2006 09:15 AM