The Broker's Record

Property Searches using Maps

April 27, 2006

The latest craze to sweep the Real Estate Web is the use of mapping technologies to find properties. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could draw a circle on a map, and then say “Show me every 2+ bedroom house in that circle, under $800K?”. It sure would be! Some web sites let you do this already, with varying degrees of ease, and I am looking at bringing that kind of functionality to this web site as well.

If you come to my web site and enter a property search, the search is managed by a third party service I pay every month for, called PropertyMinder. I’ve been using PropertyMinder for years – I’m probably one of their longest-running clients, and probably one of their most resource-intensive. The folks at PropertyMinder have just now updated their service to include some kind of mapping – you can now see the properties that match your search request plotted on a Google map. It’s pretty cool as far as it goes – but it’s not quite what I’d like to deliver to my clients.

Still, though, it’s better than nothing! So if you have already signed up for a property search on my web site, the next time you log in to see your search results, you will see a new option, which is to view the listings on a map. When you do, you will be shown a screen that may look a little something like this:

Posted by SantaCruzBroker at 9:57am
No Comments »