NYT Real Estate Classified's Redesign a Real Letdown
Without any fanfare that we’re aware of, the New York Times launched a new version of its real estate classifieds yesterday. The result? A mess, as we found yesterday afternoon as we tried to look for House of the Day candidates. Putting in a price range of $500,000 to $2 million yielded an error message;…
Without any fanfare that we’re aware of, the New York Times launched a new version of its real estate classifieds yesterday. The result? A mess, as we found yesterday afternoon as we tried to look for House of the Day candidates. Putting in a price range of $500,000 to $2 million yielded an error message; narrowing the list of available listings using the fields in the left-hand sidebar was a cumbersome, time-consuming and often error-prone process. As one reader pointed out to us via email, you can no longer select multiple property types at once; in addition, her saved searches and alerts were wiped out in the “upgrade.” The list goes on. All we want from the site is to be able to select multiple property types and multiple neighborhoods within a certain price range and see the results. This is no longer possible. Why did they do this? Our best guess is that it has something to do with trying to broaden the geographic reach of the service, based upon the prominence given to the initial search box. Unfortunately, they may have jeopardized a much sought-after local monopoly in the process. Or, as the reader who wrote to us said, “I would imagine that others, like myself, will be very disappointed at their new real estate site and be less likely to use it in the future. [The new site] is not in the interest of regular readers and users of The Times real estate site and searches.” Let’s hope they can rectify the problems quickly.
Fail.
Shoot their User Experience team.
Dear NYT: Start by alphabetizing the neighborhood names, and then fit them all into one view. Any further gap analysis will cost you.
Tell them you hate it! Please! Let’s make them fix it!
Keep it simple stupid! Yay!
It’s AWFUL! I can’t find anything. And why do I have to keep re-searching to get to the search I actually wanted. It takes FOREVER and gives no info. Plus the ads got BIGGER and the search results got smooshed.
Is everybody letting the Times know that it’s bad and is hated? They need lots of confirmation that they broke it so they stop messing with it.
I don’t understand why they think that people who run searches want graphics and fancy coding…don’t they know about Google and Craig’s List? Those are what people want! The search results not they’re web people trying out new and ill-conceived tricks they just learned at the most recent web conference!
Another big issue is the “new homes” selection. It used to be that new listings were those listed in the past 7 days. Now, a mix of old and some more recent listings (14 day!) comes up when you click “new homes”. It doesn’t sort them. Truly sucks. Big mistake. And who needs you to further specify between single family home or single family townhome??? Totally useless for NYC!
This is an absolutely horrible development. My saved listings were wiped out yesterday as well. NYT used to be the best place to look for new properties. Now, it’s impossible to sort through the results with any efficacy. Another big issue is having to specify multi-or single-family townhouse. It used to be just “townhouse” as a category. Many brokers and sellers don’t bother to specify this for a search function, or do so incorrectly. Sure, it looks nicer, but has lost almost all functionality.
Carroll Gardens is Red Hook. Real Estate agents came up with the term Carroll Gardens after the BQE highway was put in place as to distinguish from the common folks in Red Hook and get more money. If the housing bubble would have not bursted they were going to call Carroll Gardens TransManhatten just so they could sell the houses at even higher prices. When is the greed going to come to an end?
the revamp is sucktacular.
It’s like they saw all the great features of Trulia and decided they wanted to created Son of Trulia.
I do call my neighborhood ParkSlopeSouthSouthSouthSouth
Three more souths, and I’m in.
There’s ParkSlopeSouth…then Greenwood Heights…then Sunset Park…then Bay Ridge.
BRG – My favorite is when they list things on 70th street as “Park Slope South”