Oodle Classifieds—Now with Market Efficiency!

If you or a loved one are addicted to the classified-ad section of your local paper, you know the syndrome. Users spend a lot of time in research mode, checking listings simply to figure out what constitutes a good deal on that Mazda Miata or two-bedroom rental of their dreams.

Online classified-ad aggregator Oodle has realized this and has introduced the Oodle Index, a comprehensive real-time, locally-based price gauge for some of the most popular categories of ads it offers.

At launch, the Oodle Index will list price ranges for cars, real estate and rental apartments contained in the company’s index of more than 20 million listings from 75,000 sources and covering the major metro areas and suburbs around the country.

“We see a lot of data flowing through our system, and thought it would be useful to use that data to compile pricing guides for consumers,” says Oodle CEO and founder Craig Donato. “This is interesting because the data isn’t based on samples but on a comprehensive view of the entire market. It can be highly localized on a metro or even a neighborhood level. And it will be timely, with daily updates.”

Oodle’s intention is to be not just a search engine for classified ads but a full-featured online shopping engine, Donato says. To that end, the company started watching how users behaved during a product search and found that they often start by doing a number of searches simply to get a sense of price ranges.

“We watched people shopping for a used car, and found that their first 20 or 30 searches were aimed at understanding what the market price was, and what was a ‘good deal’,” he says. “Once they understood that, then they snapped into a hunting mode and were ready to jump on a bargain.”

“We’ve tried to compress that into two steps, quickly showing them the market information and then letting them set up an alert system so they can hunt more easily. The Oodle Index will give users an accurate snapshot of what’s happening in their local market. That’s especially important in classifieds, where pricing in a lot of the categories can be very inefficient.”

Oodle Index data is displayed inside an interactive tool at the top of the results page for an Oodle search. For example, a Chicago-area search for a 2002 Honda Accord with 40,000 to 50,000 miles on the odometer produces a bar chart with six bars, showing the number of cars available with those specs for six price ranges from $12,000 through $17,000. Mousing over each bar shows how many Hondas at that price are available now and how many have come through Oodle listings in the last six months. Clicking on the bar will bring up the actual listings for Honda Accords in that price range on the left side of the page.

Users also see the current average asking price for that make and model Honda in the Chicago area ($14,090 at press time) and local Oodle averages for the same model in 2005 and 2006.

Users who don’t see listings to suit their taste or who are looking for a relatively hard-to-find car or property can set an e-mail alert that will notify them immediately when a listing that meets their needs comes into Oodle’s database

Donato said future refinements to the interface will let car shoppers calculate the optimum balance of mileage, year and price for cars in their local areas—to figure out how more much you’d need to pay for a 2003 Accord with 40,000 miles compared to a 2002 model, for example.

“All this data comes from watching people shop and figuring out what questions they need to ask themselves before they buy,” he said. “The Oodle Index tool lets users use local market data to guide their search and thus their buying behavior.”

It may also go some way toward turning the classifieds into a more economically efficient market by giving shoppers a bigger picture of what’s available and for how much. For example, Donato says, he’s noticed that the best buys on used cars seems to be found on the outskirts of major metro areas.

Oodle is now working on a market trending tool that will let users examine Oodle’s aggregate data in real time to find the most popular used cars in a given metro or to compare prices for two-bedroom apartments across both Chicago and San Francisco. “We’ve seen some interesting things in examining that data, such as the red states seeing a lot of Ford Explorers and Chevy Silverados while the blue states have more Accords,” Donato says. “And the San Francisco Bay area is the only major metro to have two cars from the Mercedes E-class in the top ten sellers list.”

No word yet on whether the Oodle Index will be applied to the site’s new Personals sector, which offers up almost a million personal dating profiles from third-party sites. But the company has done some preliminary looking at that aggregate data too. And why not? Personals are very much like the classified market, Donato says: highly localized, dealing in one-of-a-kind products, and the transactions take place offline.

“We’ve been correlating zodiac signs with other results from the personals and finding some really interesting things that we haven’t surfaced yet on the site,” he says. “But we’ve found that Capricorns score very high in everything.”