I’ve been reading about Zillow’s new smart search, and the discussions that are springing up about map based real estate navigation, and think, what Zillow really needs is a Google My Maps type application.
Maybe it already exists, but what I would find most useful is a map application where you could draw a boundary manually to search from. Check out this map
It’s a small development of Mid-Century Modern homes that are completely unique from everything else around them. City, Zip Code, and even neighborhood searches don’t know how to filter these homes. Someone who would want to buy here might not consider another home in the area for miles.
I think many people look for homes based on a particular block, or on one side of the tracks, or along a street with a view. A national aggregator like Zillow will struggle to define a neighborhood in this manner. I don’t think Move.com even wants to. The more homes they can show the better right? Wrong. Instead of dumping a pile of data onto the user, why not let them filter out what they know they don’t want?
On top of that, how useful would it be for an RE agent to be able to draw a boundary around their prospect farm, and set up an RSS feed of every new bit of data that pertains to these houses?
Real estate is more local than any national company is ever going to know how to parse. It seems to me that it would make more sense to give the reader the ability to parse it for themselves.
Mortgage Industry Professionals. Like what you see?
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Todd: Don’t mean to sound like a realtor.com stooge, but that is actually what the team was trying to accomplish with the “neighborhood wiki” feature that lets you draw your own boundaries. To check it out for Denver, click on the “Add a neighborhood” tab of this page: http://neighborhoods.realtor.com/Denver/427/Metro
The satellite view is borderline voyeuristic. There appears to be someone standing at the corner of E. Yale St. and S. Humboldt. I’m not kidding.
Dustin, that’s actually pretty close to what I’d like. Only, it doesn’t appear to be working as it says there are no listings when I know there are two. Maybe they simply aren’t in Realtor.com’s database,
Todd: Give it a day… I haven’t checked it recently, but at one point in dev it used to take a few hours before all the listings are mapped to a new “neighborhood”.
Paul: Voyeuristic is right! If not downright odd at times. If you play around enough on the gigapixel photos, you’ll see all kinds of weird things.
Zillow Launches New Smart Search using maps… But it works too slow as I think. As for me, search does not need maps, search needs speed and clarity. It seems that Zillow thinks too much about so-called web 2.0.
Hi Todd,
We’ve got Visual Search going on over in chilly England. Feel free to have a play…and check out our blog response
http://www.zoomf.com/blog/index.php/archives/116
So far Zoomf looks the best. That’s a really cool interface.
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