Google Real Estate launched in UK

News broke last December that Google was “entering” the UK/European real estate market, which at the time sent the share prices of Rightmove (an online real estate portal who was also the first UK property portal to launch an application for the iPhone)  into a tailspin hammering it down a whopping 10.3% to 499.9p.

And now, it has arrived and Google Real Estate search can be found on Google Maps.  To have a significant impact on UK portal sites though as first thought, there are problem areas Google will have to tackle:

A key challenge for Google is managing active abuse of the free listings site, as well as ensuring listings are up to date as Agents are notorious for leaving old listings up on portal sites, management of the same listing from multiple sources and how to drive significant traffic to the Google Real Estate section while maintaining the PPC revenues it already captures from real estate related searches.

That being said, Google Real Estate have launched with partners including Countrywide, UK’s largest estate agency and online only players including Thinkproperty.com and Ezylet.  It will be interesting to see how Rightmove react now.