When shopping for a new home, wouldn’t it be nice just hop on your laptop, log onto a website, and drag and drop a photo of a house you like, prompting ones that look similar to pop-up for you to look at?
Well, Norfolk-based Homes.com has made that search function a reality.
“Snap & Search BETA is an entirely new feature for both Homes.com and the real estate sector, allowing image-based search of millions of properties through Artificial Intelligence,” said Dave Mele, Homes.com CEO. “Just as the name suggests, users can either snap a photo of a home with their phone’s camera or grab a photo they’ve saved from other sites like Pinterest or Houzz, and upload it to Homes.com to search for homes with similar exterior styles in their desired location.”
Mele said Snap & Search is the industry’s first visual search option and offers consumers a way to turn their dreams into reality, by searching for their ideal home using “inspiration photos” and finding a match in the area they love.
Once on the site users can narrow down the area in which they want results from. The technology behind Snap & Search looks for areas of similarity in the uploaded “desired” image to images in the selected geographical area.
The program then identifies matches based on architectural style and/or exterior finish, in addition to machine learning algorithms which analyze hundreds of millions of property images on the website.
Homes.com has also launched two other major features: Match, which Mele said is a “more human way” to search for a home. In the search criteria, house hunters can prioritize what they “must have” and also what would be “nice to have,” just like they do when talking to an agent.
Match then assigns a match percentage to that home based on how well it fits their preferences, allowing homes to not be automatically ruled out if they don’t possess “nice to have” features.
HomeShare is another new feature. Mele said it simplifies the collaborative aspect of searching for homes. When searching together with family, friends, and agents, HomeShare lets collaborators save, share, comment, and track their favorite listings within Homes.com.
“As the only search that’s tailor made for house hunters, Match serves up the information that’s uniquely right for your criteria, rather than presenting all the information equally and requiring the user to determine what is and isn’t relevant,” Mele added.
Mele said the new features were “built from the ground up” in an effort to “put joy back into finding a home online,” and that the features are available across all platforms.
“We set out to reinvent the home search category with the goal to provide a delightful experience for today’s digitally savvy homebuyers,” he said.
