My Conference Call With Poppy Dinsey of Zoomf.

Earlier this week I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Poppy Dinsey of London-based Zoomf (Yee Haw for Skype). Don’t let the name fool you, this is one incredibly bright and articulate Real Estate/Web 2.0 Geek with a passion that would rival most in the industry.

So how the heck did I meet some random woman that works for a real estate search site half way around the globe? Why Twitter of course. You can keep up on her latest banter by following her at @PoppyZoomf.

So after some technical challenges and Poppy removing herself from ear shot of the programmers, we got down to business. What I found out was fascinating. Zoomf and Roost are really trying to accomplish the same thing by providing consumers with an informative and easy-to-use real estate search site with the most up-to-date data possible.

The big advantage that Roost has over Zoomf is the fact that there is a formalized Multiple Listing Service (MLS) in the US which the UK does not have. The big advantage that Zoomf has over Roost is that they can scrape real estate websites to aggregate the data (a big no no in the states). There were also some very distinct differences in regards to the brokerages themselves. Unlike in the US where the agents really retain the power because of their direct client relationships, in the UK they have estate agents that can work for the brokerage on salary, commission or a combination of the two. You could seriously walk in to a brokerage five times and talk to five different estate agents. That would never happen in the US.

Currently Zoomf is concentrating on the UK property market where like the US, more than 80% of consumers are searching for property online. As stated on their website…”Up until now the property search market in the UK was missing something, the ability to truly ’search’. Enthused by the support of leading estate agents, we set out to build the solution, a genuine vertical search engine that showed unbiased and complete results. The result was Zoomf.com. “

Zoomf has plans to bring the rest of Europe into their search engine in the near future and if Poppy has a hand in it, I won’t doubt it will be another success story.

Thanks again for your time Poppy.

Derek Overbey
Sr. Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com
Twitter – @doverbey