If a company can make billions of dollars on Windows, why not doors, roofs, and white picket fences? So goes the thinking at Microsoft, which is apparently hoping to skim a matchmakers fee off introducing home buyers to sellers.
But its planned debut in the real-estate business, through a Web site codenamed "Boardwalk" after a pricey property in the popular Monopoly board game, looks more like an easy fit with Microsoft's one-stop shopping empire than an innovative approach to property sales.
"It's kind of redundant," said Stuart Wolff, chairman and CEO of Realtor.com, whose real-estate listings site already covers much of the same ground Microsoft aims to tackle. "It's not just about data, it's about relationships. And that's something we've already accomplished," says Wolff, whose site yesterday listed 906,000 homes, out of the 1.2 million available listings in the country.
Microsoft admits it may not be able to improve much on what others have done. "This is not about some bright-eyed business-school grad thinking he can reinvent the entire industry," said Matt Kursh, a Microsoft manager who announced Boardwalk in late July at the Real Estate Connect '97 conference in San Francisco. "The process of buying a house is painful, and it doesn't have to be. We think we're the perfect company to sort it out," he explained.
But analysts say Boardwalk - due to launch early next year - might simply make the perfect mate to Sidewalk, Microsoft's local city guide. In fact, the real-estate project is being run by the Sidewalk business unit at Microsoft.
"People who are buying a new home need local content," said Nicole Vanderbilt, an analyst at Jupiter Communications. "People relocating from New York to LA, for example, want to know what dry cleaners are in their neighborhoods, and where they can get their car fixed. Sidewalk will help them investigate the new area, and Boardwalk will help them buy the house."
And if they stick with Microsoft, they can make their travel plans through the Microsoft's Expedia and buy their new sport utility vehicles through Microsoft's CarPoint.
But Vanderbilt, who was present when Microsoft announced Boardwalk, said many of the 1,400 real estate brokers in attendance were unconvinced. "They're still skeptical about how the medium can help them. It's still a very paper-based process, and the decision and the completion of the sale can't be made online," she said.
The new site will partner with Multiple Listing Services throughout the country and with lenders, rather than harvesting listings or getting into the mortgage business on its own. Microsoft has assembled an advisory board for the site that consists of representatives from large agencies like Prudential and Re/Max, as well as lenders like Countrywide Home Loans.
But Bill Wendell, a Cambridge, Massachusetts realtor who runs the Real Estate Cafe, providing home buyers with Web access, calls Boardwalk "a sellout to the industry." Real-estate agents, he says, are threatened by consumers who try to sell their own homes, and Microsoft, ignoring the prevailing consumer-empowering Web trends, doesn't plan to allow "for sale by owner" listings.
"They're propping up an obsolete business model and compensation structure, when they really ought to be using technology to help consumers buy and sell homes more efficiently," Wendell said.
All in due time, the folks at Microsoft say. The project has been staffed for just three months now and Kursh says, "There are lots of things we can do to streamline the process for the consumer. We don't expect people to type in credit-card numbers and buy homes, but they will be able to type in credit-card numbers and find lenders."
Part of the company's goal in announcing a product that is still vaporware was reportedly to assuage brokers' anxieties. "We said we're not going to get rid of real-estate agents, or become a mortgage banker, or anything like that - it's not our schtick," said Kursh. The agents present to hear that message, perhaps unfamiliar with Redmond's competitive streak, were apparently pleased by the news. Kursh said, "They sort of heaved a sigh of relief."
