Better Homes and Garden Launches. So What?
Better Homes and Garden launched their new brand and real estate search site today. From a consumer perspective I don’t see why I’d switch from the current site I would be using to this.
Likes
- Their tabbing of the results list makes recent sales nice and discoverable
- I like how the search options expand (the default view) and collapse
- I like the rollovers on Look, Learn, Live. It makes the sub-content discoverable.
- Auto complete for search locations
Dislikes
- The site is slow. At Inman someone from the site said that they get all the listings in real time via a webservice call instead of storing them themselves. Yikes.
- They only have 6 listings in 98122. We have 314.
- The plus/minus controls for square footage and price require way too many clicks to get the value you want
- Auto complete for search locations doesn’t include neighborhoods
Most troubling for me is when someone at Inman asked them how the site was different for customers from all the other websites out there and the answer was a long winded response about a brand you can trust and a “lifestyle” brand instead of addressing what costumers are looking for and aren’t getting from their competitors that they now offer.