A Bird’s Eye View

“There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.”
-Brendan Behan, Irish Dramatist & Author

Touché. We’ve hardly written anything more than our own birth certificate since we were hatched just one month ago. And since we are all bite and no bark (all engineers and product people and currently no marketing department), we certainly enjoy the buzz from peer reviews and blogs. So we thought we’d share a few of our favorite mentions from the past couple of weeks.

The Buzz:

“So the blogosphere has been lighting up with references to the recent launch of Roost. Roost is a very effective real estate search interface… because of the richness and quality of the content AND because the experience is so seamless and smooth. Roost offer[s] a next generation platform for buyers agents to market their services against the most powerful backdrop of all – compliant, ‘market fresh’ MLS content. I have to hand it to them; Roost gets an A in my book.”
Michael Seguin, Tales from the Techside
http://psyne.net/blog4/2008/02/20/come-home-to-roostsm/

The Partnerships:

“Even in this digital age, real estate agents still serve a purpose when it comes to showing you homes, however, more and more of us are conducting our initial property searches online. Roost is a service that aims to please by connecting you to the real estate listings in the locations that you’re interested in.”
Brandon Watts, Locker Gnome
http://www.lockergnome.com/windows/2008/02/08/roost/

The Consumer Experience:

“Roost is great example of a rich search experience. They have a very tight design that meets most of the requirements for providing an easy way to seek out information, refine the results, and save searches to make it easier for future use.”
Theresa Neil, Design Genie
http://theresaneil.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/the-ultra-rich-search-experience/

“The best example of this [‘ultra rich search experience’] is in kayak.com and roost.com (which has an absolutely superb house finding tool)… Compare how laborious it is to change the filters in ebay vs roost. Roost feel[s] that this interface is so integral they are willing to pay for extra servers and the architecture to support it to create this wonderful experience.”
Bill Scott, Director UI Engineering, Netflix
http://looksgoodworkswell.blogspot.com/2008/02/pattern-refining-search.html

The Smart Search:

“Its interface is very intuitive. Users can type in the name of a town to bring up all properties for sale, then use sliders to adjust numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage and other criteria to instantly narrow the search down.”
Chris Nutall, Financial Times
http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2008/02/realtors-come-home-to-roost/

Industry Response:

“Roost.com is a good addition to the crowded national field of websites that aggregate. Their product is far superior to most of them including the realtor’s worst enemy, Realtor.com. Consumers will like the simplicity of the layout. We are partnering with Roost in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and their staff are a pleasure to work with.”
David Winans GMAC Real Estate, http://www.TexasMLS.com/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/22/

Thank you all for the praise! We are truly humbled. And we’ll continue to develop the fastest and most efficient home search and rely on you for our advertising… right now, our advertising is simply word of mouth. Any guesses on when we’ll see the Wikipedia entry for Roost?