At first the map interface is a little overwhelming (especially in a dense area), but after zooming in the data becomes much more manageable. The map also has a great filter on the left hand side, which makes searching even easier. Once you have found a property, you can quickly view the listing details in a bottom pane.
The interface becomes a little cluttered with the bottom pane, but all the listing details are easily accessible via the bottom tabs.
How do they compare to Trulia, zillow, craigslist, and Move? Really, in this particular battle the interface doesn’t matter. It is about the number of listings and the number of eyeballs. Agents/listings/consumers/etc will go with the one with the most and right now it is Move.com/Realtor.com. However, Trulia is gaining!
Overall, this was still a great launch for Hotpads, and they did come out swinging with over 200k listings. The Property Listing Battle continues!
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From World Mapper:
This map shows the price of the housing stock of a territory, in purchasing power parity. This means that prices shown take into account the variation in what can be bought for US$1 in different territories. The most expensive housing per person in the world is in Europe, where a home is now usually no longer just somewhere to live, but is also an investment.
A very interesting map to look at, especially for those involved in international real estate.
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We hope this turns into a useful resource for everyone in our field.
]]>Things are no different here around eppraisal.com. A couple of us decided to break out a little of our time and create a mashup minisite for real estate. Famous last thoughts before we got started, “how about we create a mashup that maps the web applications, websites and blogs in the US real estate world online?”
Realty AppMap is just that. We’ve seeded it with a couple dozen companies and bloggers that we knew the addresses of, or could find fairly easily. However, we know that there are many many more, especially bloggers, that aren’t listed. You can sort the list by the tags at the top, or you can move the map around an look at it by geographic location.
We’d like you to add to that list by submitting your blog or company to it. You can do that by clicking on the link at the bottom of the page “Click here to submit your company”. If you’d rather not put in a street address, that’s fine, we’ll accept it if it has the city/state fields filled out.
Have fun, and please email us if you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions.
[Update: The site is up and running again. Apologies for the downtime this weekend.]
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Inman is reporting that the Houston MLS has decided to move forward with allowing postings of their properties to Google Base. With Zillow’s recent move, I’m not surprised. Like I mentioned in my last post, we hadn’t yet heard from the real “big boys” on the Web, and I think we’re starting to now.
The MLS-supplied property information displayed at Google Base contains links that direct consumers to the association’s own property listings site for more details, and that site, in turn, directs users to its members’ Web sites. The association’s property-search site is popular among consumers, drawing about 700,000 unique visitors in November, Hale said. About 23,000 brokers and agents participate in the association’s MLS, and the association hosts about 56,000 active listings.
Like Greg mentioned in, real estate search is local. You only care about what you can find in your area the easiest. Google is already a place you go to, so if it becomes easy to find a house for sale there, then there’s a high probability that you’ll end up there if you’re looking for a house in Houston now.
Let’s see how this plays out. Google will be a force to reckon with if they can get a large amount of the MLSs on board. Houston isn’t enough, but it’s a start.
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I recently came across Neighboroo, a website that mashes-up Google Maps with demographic data. You can search for a number of things, ranging from median home price to elementary school levels. You can scroll around the map yourself, or enter a location into the search box to search a local area.
What I like about Neighboroo is that you can get down to the local zip code level. I ran a quick search for Orlando and found the following map. You can click on “More Info” to see the full demographic data for that zip code.
I think we’ll continue to find that as technology companies make their data easier to work with (ex: Google Maps API), and government and other private organizations making their data more accessible, that mashups such as Neighboroo will be more common.
]]>Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the newest iteration of Virtual Earth, allowing 3D views of specific cities. The most interesting change though is the fact that Microsoft now allows advertising in this 3D environment – Joel reports that ZipRealty and John L. Scott are the two first movers in the real estate industry to use it.
I have two main thoughts on this new functionality. First, I like the way it looks and the tweaks that have been done to the map interface. We’ve been playing around with it on eppraisal.com, and have found it very usable though it is messing with some of our controls.
My second thought is that as a map lover, I don’t really like the garish billboard advertising. It seems a little bit too intrusive for me. I understand the value to advertisers, but I’m not sure if I like how much it is in my face. Now, the advertising will only be within the free version of the map. Users like ourselves who pay Microsoft the licensing fees to put the map in our application won’t (shouldn’t) have this in there.
Time will tell if the web will accept this type of advertising or not. Also, what I don’t like is that it’s not cross-platform compliant and doesn’t work on Firefox. My logs show me that a good 30% of our users are on Firefox or a Mac, so that means something to us. Either way, it’s very well done and a great new step towards interactivity on the map interface.
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The 435 congressional districts are outlined on HotPads’ Maps, with red and blue designating the party affiliation of the districts’ current Representatives. By clicking on the districts’ “I” buttons below the districts’ titles, users can view quick facts about the district including the current Representative and the candidates in November’s contest. By clicking on the quick facts bubble, users can get more detailed information: HotPads has incorporated Wikipedia articles with detailed information about the candidates and the close races. (from their blog)
Overall, this is a great example of how companies in the online real estate space can differentiate their products. Kudos to Hotpads for a job well done.
]]>Ever wish your company had the balls to do something fun that gets you noticed?
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Did you know that the Playboy Mansion is roughly worth $5,907,559? Also, did you know that this number is $54,622 less than it was a week ago? The only reason I know this is because of Yahoo’s new Real Estate site.
August 29th, 2006 marks the day that Yahoo made their remodeled real estate site public. There are a lot of new features including current home valuations courtesy of Zillow, over 3 million real estate listings to surf through courtesy of Prudential Real Estate, interactive maps, and aerial views of homes. They also have a few values of famous homes for you to play with, probably to see what the site can do. I wonder when Google will come out with something to compete against this.
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