(Credit:
Roost)
Roost, a San Francisco-based real estate search site, has secured $8 million in funding, bucking the slowdown trend in the property market and economy overall, the company announced on Tuesday.
Shasta Ventures led the round, which also included General Catalyst Partners, The Cross Country Group LLC and Geolo Capital, who had previously provided $5.5 million.
"In this tumultuous time, many Americans are looking for an investment alternative to the stock market," Jason Pressman, managing director at Shasta Ventures who will join Roost's board of directors, said in a statement. Roost is able to provide the most accurate picture of a given housing market and therefore help consumers make truly informed decisions."
Roost also announced a partnership with First American CoreLogic to bring listings of foreclosed homes to the site.
The company launched in early 2008 after partnering with local real estate brokers and Multiple Listing Service boards across the U.S. Roost.com is a search engine that sits on top of a hosted network of Internet Data Exchange sites run by real estate brokers.
Zillow.com, which in November 2007 teamed up with a consortium of newspapers to carry their listings on its real-estate site, has now expanded that deal to include the sale of ads on each other's sites.
Under the Zillow Advertising Network agreement, the consortium's advertisers can tap into Zillow's user base of more than 5 million unique monthly visitors, while Zillow's advertisers will have access to readers of the newspapers' online real-estate content.
The newspaper consortium includes 11 major newspaper companies, including the Hearst Newspapers, MediaNews Group, and E.W. Scripps.
"This partnership allows advertisers with our papers to reach not only local real-estate consumers who live in particular markets, but also consumers who may be moving to particular markets, via their searches on Zillow.com," Lincoln Millstein, a Hearst Newspapers senior vice president, said in a statement.
The launch of the advertising network comes at a time when the real-estate industry is facing a steep decline in home prices, driven by a tightening credit crunch.
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