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; 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.