Big news out of Google yesterday, via Ken Shafer, that the search giant is discontinuing real estate and rental searches on Google Maps, citing low adoption, technical constraints and “the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites” (hopefully they’re referring to all the fine ILSs out there). I suspect low monetization might also be playing a part, but that’s pure speculation. What’s not is that Google has no compunction killing underperforming products. Remember Wave? Froogle?
Google and its map-based real estate and apartment search was a hot topic at last year’s AIM conference, and Google will continue to be a player in real estate and apartment search. But clearly they’re retrenching, perhaps focusing resources on their Places product. Either way, I suspect whatever is up their sleeve will be discussed heavily this year at AIM, other conferences and the multifamily blogosphere.
Read Google’s official blog post announcing the news.
