REDMOND, Wash., June 14, 2001 — For the fourth consecutive time, the MSN® HomeAdvisor™ online home and real estate guide has been named the nation’s Best Real Estate Portal, according to the Gomez™ Summer 2001 Real Estate Portals Scorecard™
. The rankings are based on an independent evaluation of the top 10 real estate Web sites, using more than 150 criteria. MSN HomeAdvisor leads the category as the only real estate portal to ever win four straight Gomez scorecards.
With an overall score of 7.30, HomeAdvisor dramatically increased its lead over all other real estate portals, far outdistancing its next closest competitor, Homestore.com (6.68). In fact, the overall score of HomeAdvisor is the highest received by a real estate portal since Gomez began reviewing the category.
Gomez praised HomeAdvisor for its wealth of listings and breadth of content while pointing out that the recent additions and enhancements made to the site contributed to its No. 1 overall ranking for the fourth consecutive review and its top score in the Ease of Use and Customer Confidence categories. HomeAdvisor, with more than 1 million home listings throughout the United States, was also recognized by Gomez as the best site for home sellers.
The Gomez win caps an impressive streak of recent awards and accolades for HomeAdvisor, including being named the Best Online Home-Buying Site by Yahoo! Internet Life and one of its 50 Most Incredibly Useful Sites. Family PC also recently recognized MSN HomeAdvisor as one of its Top 25 Financial Sites. The momentum and success surrounding HomeAdvisor extend beyond industry awards as well. HomeAdvisor has more than tripled its traffic in the past six months, making it both the largest and fastest-growing site in the real estate category in terms of unique users. As a result of this rapid growth in consumer traffic, HomeAdvisor is now sending more than 7,300 customers on average to its real estate partners each day, up nearly 50 percent since January.
“Being named the industry’s best real estate portal four consecutive times by Gomez is a testament to the trust real estate partners and consumers alike place in HomeAdvisor,”
said Ian Morris, product unit manager for MSN HomeAdvisor.
About MSN HomeAdvisor
MSN HomeAdvisor is the Internet’s most complete guide for finding everything about the home. With fully integrated content and services ranging from improving and maintaining to buying and financing a home, HomeAdvisor is one of the most trusted names in the online real estate category. Named Best Online Home-Buying Site on the Web by Gomez Advisors Inc. in its past four consecutive Internet Home-Buying Scorecards, HomeAdvisor was also named Best Overall Home-Buying Site by Yahoo! Internet Life, and is a PC Magazine Top 100 Web site and a Family PC Web Site of the Month. Part of the MSN network of Internet services, HomeAdvisor can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.homeadvisor.com/ .
About Microsoft
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq
“MSFT”
) is the worldwide leader in software, services and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software — any time, any place and on any device.
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