Tag Archives: Mapping

The State of Real Estate Search

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real estate search enginesTom over at the Seattle Property News summed the current state of real estate search with this question: “Is there a regional bubble in online real estate sites?”

From a consumer’s point-of-view, it is wonderful that home buyers (and sellers!) are starting to see so many options come on the market. I’ve really enjoyed following as more and more of these tools come on-line and I thought I would take today to review some of the posts I’ve had on real estate search. If you are looking to freshen up on the future of real estate search, there is lots of information (and links to more info) in the following articles:

As a fun little aside, when a new search site is announced I like to see the type of buzz that it is getting in the blogosphere. The chart from this post shows the relative buzz that Trulia, Redfin and Zillow have been getting.

Also, there are a few small search sites, like Propsmart, that I haven’t covered mainly because I simply don’t have anything interesting to say about them yet. However, if you are building (or have built) a real estate search site, I’m definitely interested in hearing about it!

Yahoo Maps is Now Driving Innovation!

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Yahoo Map of Seattle DestinationsI’ve been waiting (and searching) for a mapping site that gives multi-destination directions and the new (still in Beta) Yahoo Maps definitely delivers!

Here are some of the features that I have wanted to see in an on-line maps and how the Beta Yahoo Maps stands up:

  1. Multi-destination: This allows you to type in a bunch of addresses and get directions from one site to the next all on one map. This feature alone should make Yahoo Maps (beta) the default online mapping program for all real estate agents (and home buyers!). Thank you Yahoo!
  2. Best routing of destinations: theoretically, you’d be able to hit a button and have the mapping software tell you the most efficient route to get between multiple points. Yahoo does not have this feature (yet?), but they do let you manually change the order of your destinations! To do this, you simple have to drag the address within the sidepanel above (or below) another address.
  3. Remembering addresses. It is nice that Yahoo maps is integrated with my Yahoo Address book. The only problem is that I haven’t used my Yahoo Address book in years so all the addresses (and there are 100s) are old (including my “home”). It looks like it might be time to return to my Yahoo address book!
  4. Mobile Phone Integration: Getting directions via my mobile phone is currently a pain. I have a blackberry with internet access, but the current mapping sites are too slow and any misspellings require retyping things… I did try out Yahoo Maps a few weeks ago (and I liked that I had access to my on-line Yahoo address book), but, again, the addresses in my address book were so outdated, that it didn’t do me a lot of good. Seeing has how the Yahoo Maps has the “email map” and “Send to phone” options, it looks like it might be time to update my Yahoo address book!
  5. Live Traffic Data: I also like that Yahoo has integrated live traffic data (like freeway speeds). I’d be interested to see them add traffic cameras (Along the lines of Bus Monster).

Ideally, I’d like to be able to map out a bunch of homes while sitting at my home computer and email a set of directions to myself. All the addresses would be remembered (by Yahoo Maps) so that I could easily get an updated set of directions while on the road via my mobile phone. It looks like Yahoo is definitely going in that direction, but when I tried to email myself a map with four destinations, it only returned a generic map. I had similar problems trying to get a “printable version” of the map so I’m thinking that my problems might be related to the fact that I’m working on a Mac. Hopefully they will fix these issues soon!

And speaking of bugs, the beta version of Yahoo Maps did not work for me while using Firefox on my Mac. I had to revert to IE in order to see the graphics. Again, hopefully they will fix this bug soon!

One last thing before I call it a night… I played around with some of the programs that have been created with the Yahoo Map API, and it looks like they are finally at a level that is competitive with Google… My favorite mash-up so far maps out local events based on yahoo’s event calendar. Note that it would be really nice if this event mash-up had a city/zip search bar so that I could easily navigate from SF to Seattle, but instead, I had to zoom way out and zoom way back in is really nice that this program DOES have a city/zip search bar. (As Toby says in one of the comments: “For moving around in the events browser, you can highlight the city name above the map and type in a city or zip. It’ll jump straight where you want it to go.”) . Other than that issue, it It is a nice little program which I’ll definitely use again! I’m especially jazzed (or is it “rocked”) that I found out the Red Elvises are playing at the Tractor Tavern this Saturday! 🙂

Update 1: After posting this article, I noticed that I wasn’t the only one excited about the Local Event Browser. Jeremy Zawodny gives a good round up of all the excitement by Yahoo staff regarding the new map capabilities. I especially like that Yahoo has made an API for their geocoder. A free and easy-to-use geocoder is a major missing link from the Google Maps API. (what is a geocoder? In the simplest sense, a geocoder gives a latitude and a longitude for a given address.) It will be interesting to see if Google responds by opening up an address geocoder as well.

The Rebirth of Redfin?

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[photopress:tyler_scott_01.jpg,thumb,alignright]In response to my recent slew of posts on real estate search engines, a reader (Amy Wu) left a comment asking if I’d ever tried Redfin. I’ve definitely tried Redfin and at one point I was a huge fan of their site. As a matter of fact, way back in March (before the days of plentiful google map-hacks), I mentioned how great it is to be able to get a birds-eye view of properties using Redfin. By the way, that was only my 3rd post for Rain City Guide (RCG)!

However, around June, RCG had a falling out with Redfin when they changed their business model to directly compete with Real Estate agents. One of the more interesting outcomes of my June post is that a former employee of Redfin wrote a long comment detailing some of his negative experiences while working at Redfin. After posting the comment, he asked that I delete it after David Ecker (founder and CEO of Redfin) wrote to him threatening a lawsuit.

However, I’m always willing to give people a second chance, so based on the Amy’s prompt, I decided to revisit Redfin. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they no longer mention the service I objected to. Go Redfin! I’m not sure if my posting had anything to do with the elimination of that poorly thought-out service, but either way, I’m pleased to see that they no longer advertise that service on their site.

So, in honor of my complete re-look at Redfin, I thought I’d compare them in the same method that I’ve been comparing sites like Trulia and Home Pages?

The Great:

  • Neighborhood Focus: Their interface makes it extremely easy to focus on local neighborhoods
  • Agent Integration: Their business model includes an easy way for agents to sign up and take part in their success!


The Good:

  • Stability: Their flash maps are much more stable than Home Pages (especially on a Mac)
  • Real Estate Data: Up-to-date date of homes-for-sale and sold-home
  • Personalized Mapping: Their maps are quick and don’t rely on another company’s service!
  • They’re Local: They serve (and only serve) the Seattle area (King County to be specific)

The bad:

  • They’re Local: They serve (and only serve) the Seattle area. I know from my stats that many of my readers are from other parts of the country/world, and Redfin simply will not help you at all!
  • Porting to other areas: I’ve heard for quite a while that Redfin was thinking of expanding to other areas, but their web-backend is apparently too complex to easily add to new areas. Having worked extensively with spatial data (GIS) for many years, I’m would not be surprised to hear that they are having problems adding new cities, but it is definitely disappointing. Along those lines, a service like Home Pages that relies on more generic neighborhood data (like school district data available from the Census District) has a much easier time going national!

The Ugly:

    Arrogance: When I talk with people from Trulia and LTD, I get a sense of excitement from the developers and a real sense that they want to hear how they can better serve their target market. The people at Redfin rarely return emails, and really don’t seem interested in hearing suggestions. I get the impression that they are sure they know the best way to serve the industry…

Regardless of their business politics, Redfin offers some pretty darn good real estate mapping features. If you are looking for a home in King County (Seattle, Redmond, Bellevue, etc.), I would definitely recommend checking them out! But when looking toward the future of real estate search, I just don’t see much excitement happening at Redfin, so unless there is a major change in their direction, I doubt they will still seem like an interesting real estate search one year from now (let alone 5 years!).

Better Late than Never

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Smiling SashaJohn Cook’s Venture Blog pointed out today that Zillow got a new look and is now looking for beta users… Much to Zillow’s credit, they’ve created an aura of excitement despite the fact that no one knows what their product will look like, or when it will be available.

This got me thinking that it is clearly time for some updates on real estate search. The past two weeks, I’ve been too busy at work (WAY TOO BUSY) to write any posts, so I was glad that Anna took up some slack and wrote about Home Pages. However, I’ve had this nagging need to write a little more about the site, and I’ve finally found some time. Here are some of my notes from my test-drive of Home Pages:

The great:

  • Neighborhood information: It is really great that they’ve integrated so many different layers into their map. Just like Home Values, in the very near future all home search sites will need to include information like schools, parks, etc.
  • Sold Home Info: It’s great to have this information integrated into the search site

The good:

  • Personalized UI/mapping: I really like that they’ve developed their own user interface instead of relying on one of the big three providers (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft). That should give them lots of flexibility into the future, although it also means they’ve taken on a whole host of update issues instead of passing the buck on that one. I’ll be interested to hear from someone at Home Values about their experience with this hosting their own mapping.

The bad:

  • Small map: Why so small? Blow up the size of the map at least 2X
  • Mac Issues: Elements of the screen don’t show up on my Mac. I lose the entire map at times… (by the way, I don’t notices this problem on my PC at work)

The ugly:

  • Contact Information: I hate websites that make you give personal information in order to get the full features. As a real estate agent, Anna already gets 2 to 3 junk emails a day from House Values (the company behind Home Pages), so I’d hate to think of the consequences of a potential home buyer giving them a phone number. Be VERY weary of giving them an email unless you want lots of emails that border on spam.

Home Pages is the only real estate search site that I’ve seen that even remotely compares to Trulia… and it has one MAJOR advantage over Trulia in that it is using updated Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data instead of screen scraping real estate sites. This is a huge advantage in that I’ve been told via email, IM, comments, etc that the data on Trulia is incomplete and outdated.

In many ways, my heart is really with the Trulia team because I think they are offering a superior search. I really like the clean UI, the RSS feeds, the home statistics, etc. but if they don’t have the most up-to-date homes available on the market, then I’d be hard-pressed to recommend their site to anyone looking to buy a home. For this reason, I’d have to say that Home Pages currently leads the market at the best publicly-available home search. If you haven’t checked their site out already, then use this post as inspiration to get an idea of where the future of real estate search is heading!

home search progress…

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house Values House Values launched a new site today that combined aerial photography with real-estate listings and extensive neighborhood information. The Seattle Times notes that Home Pages “has information covering 92 percent of the nation’s metro areas.”

HomePages combines aerial photography with neighborhood demographics. When you click on an icon, neighborhood data such as local school information is given such as the student-teacher ratio, average class size and even the name of the principal. Of course you can view all the homes for sale , but I really like that it displays the homes in relation to neighborhood amenities — libraries, restaurants, theaters, churches, banks, police and fire stations among them. If you are interested in seeing where the future of real estate search is heading, this site is definitely worth checking out.

By the way, don’t overlook the value in their House Invaders’ game… 🙂

The future does not belong to the collective, long-term agent

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I’ve been having an interesting dialog (via email) with a real estate agent who I completely respect. He brings up some interesting issues that I thought were worth bringing to the general public (these ideas want to be free instead of locked up in Google’s email archive 🙂 )

…I can certainly appreciate their (Trulia) desire to ‘break the monopoly’ but keep in mind that the MLS is just a compilation of broker-represented listings. Brokers own those listing and ultimately decide where they go for marketing purposes. ‘Breaking the monopoly’ would mean one would either have to get consensus of a critical mass of the Brokers (90%+) or become a broker oneself and start listing lots of homes. Both are unlikely… Much better to find a way to accomplish the goal of improving search within the ground rules of existing copyright law (think old Napster, new Napster)…

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I really dislike the inefficiencies in the current MLS system, and yet, I can see how everyone benefits from the increased information sharing. If the choice was between the current MLS set-up and a situation where agents all held onto their own data, I’d definitely prefer the current MLS situation…

sunflowersBut that’s not the choice anymore. Before the advent of the internet, it was only logical that agents needed to work together and form a cooperating system so that they could share listing information. And I can totally understand that agents needed listing rules in order to ensure that one rogue agent (or homeowner) didn’t screw up the whole listing situation. I can completely appreciate this history…

But what I’ve described is the historical legacy of the the MLS, not the future. The internet has changed the situation dramatically by making the sharing of information extremely easy! Rather than protecting themselves from one rogue agent or one greedy home owner, real estate agents now need to protect themselves from an onslaught! There is no way that a company that aggregated listing data from agents (as in Trulia) could have been built 10 years ago. And yet today, it seems shocking that such a site wasn’t available a week ago.

I think the comparisons to between Trulia and the old Napster are misleading, and ultimately wrong.

But first the similarities: The old Napster was fought by the recording industry because they facilitated the sharing of valuable information (music), just as Trulia will likely be fought by the real estate industry because they are facilitating the sharing of valuable information (listings).

But the way that music and listings gain value could not be more different. The value of music is embedded in each and every song and can be easily monetized for consumers (Recording industry: “that song will be 99 cents!”). The value of listings are embedded in the entirety of all the listings and each individual listing cannot be easily monetized for consumers (Real estate industry: “that listing will be 99 cents!”).

Flag over waterBut far more important… The ultimate client of the recording industry (musicians) benefit only if a song is sold and not if it is illegally downloaded. In contrast, the ultimate client of the real estate industry (home buyers and sellers) benefits every time a listing is seen (illegally or not!). As these aggregating services become more and more popular (options like Trulia, Craigslist, Ebay Real Estate, Google Classifieds, and Zillow), real estate agents are going to be constantly challenged to decide between their individual AND short-term interest (list the home as widely as possible) and their collective AND long-term interest (keep their monopoly on listings!).

In the battle of individual/short-term interests vs. collective/long-term interests, I’d put my money behind the former every time.

Trulia better real estate search

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Just as the pun is obvious, the implementation by Pete Flint and his crew at RealWide of a new real estate search engine is obviously awesome… Their new real estate search engine available and can be found at: Trulia.com

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while, then you know I’ve been following the development of new mapping technologies pretty darn closely and this is far-and-away the best implementation yet. Pete and his crew didn’t take anything for granted and put together a whole new real estate search engine! I mentioned that this site was coming out a few weeks ago, and the implementation lives up to everything Pete told me it would be.

So here’s some features I like love:

  • The search interface is as simple as entering a city name or a zip code! The UI is beautiful.
  • The filtering by other features like Price, Bedrooms, Bathrooms and Price is fast and very intuitive!
  • When click on more detail for a listing, you get the VERY useful information like the price per square foot, the days on the market, as well as details for other recently sold homes and similar homes in the area!
  • The color coded recently sold homes is awesome!
  • I really like the the location of your search is stored in the url. This allows me to easily save and or send an area of interest. For example, here are the homes for sale in the part of Los Angeles where I grew up: http://www.trulia.com/CA/Eagle_Rock/90041/. (Also notice that it has neighborhood facts on this page.)
  • It has RSS feeds so that I can subscribe to my zip code and be updated each time a listing comes on the market.
  • And the best part is that I’m sure there’s more I’m going to like, but I’ve only had a few minutes to play!

I really liked the site when I first saw it, but the more I play the more my opinion of the site improves. The best part is that I’m pretty darn sure that if I keep playing with the site, I’m going to find more gems! This site is a true work of art! Thank you Pete!

The only problem I see with it is that it is not available for Seattle (yet!). THIS IS A HUGE DRAWBACK. I want Trulia! And Pete, I’ll wait for a little while, but I’m not a very patient person! 🙂

UPDATE: I just got an email from Pete and he says “You’ll be pleased to hear our primary focus is building out coverage to other states. No promises when Seattle is live, but we’re working hard on it.” I’ll try to be patient!

spam filters, google ads and site statistics, oh my!

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I’ve made a few changes to the site recently and it seems like a good time to give some updates…

  • I added a new spam filter that has completely eliminated the amount of comment and trackback spam that I was getting. It worries me somewhat that I’ve not had one comment (besides my own test comments) since I added this filter. If you are trying to leave a comment and it does not work, please let me know via email!
  • I took down the google ads off the sidepanel and moved them to the bottom of individual posts. They seem more fitting there and hopefully you’ll find them more useful.
  • I added a site stat program, MapStats, that displays where site visitors are coming from via google maps. It is a really slick program and if you’re curious how many visitors that this site is getting (and where they are coming from), you can click on this tag Blog Flux MapStats: Stats and Counter for Rain City Real Estate Guide to find out.

I think I’m done with tweaking the site for a while. Now it is time for me to get back to providing updates on the Seattle real estate market!

map stats for rcg

Inbox: Where to Live Within Biking Distance of UW?

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Sasha With BikeI had someone email me the other day with an interesting question, and I thought I would share my response… and then see if anyone in the community could improve upon it.

Question: I’m moving to Seattle and interested in finding a neighborhood where I can bike to my work at the University of Washington (UW). Where should I be looking?

My Answer: There are a bunch of great places to live in North Seattle that are within biking distance to the UW. I would stay away from the south part of Seattle because there are not a lot of good north-south bike route through the downtown… (too many hills and not enough dedicated bike lanes).

Seeing as how I live in North Seattle and I bike a lot, I end up referencing the bike map put out by the City of Seattle quite often. Here is a direct link to the bike map of North Seattle (*.pdf), but note that this is a large file (1.5 MB). If you download the map, you’ll notice that the Burke-Gilman trail (a solid red line) goes through the UW campus. The Burke-Gilman is a wonderful commuting trail and has been recently expanded to the north-west all the way to the Golden Gardens Park. If you can find a place to live within a short ride to the Burke-Gilman, then you will have an easy ride to work!

By the way, if you follow this link, you can order a free hard-copy of the bike map: http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/transportation/bikemapform.htm

Do you have a better answer for this question? Are there any neighborhoods that are particularly attractive for bicyclists? Please share your knowledge in the comments section!

Latest stab at on-line mapping

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Eating LeavesGalen over at shackprices alerted me to a new google maps search by Windermere. I can’t say that I’m surprised to see that Windermere updated their search since their VP of technology told me they would be releasing something soon… None the less, it is always interesting to see what gets produced. My initial reaction is that they’ve built a really clean home search tool (note that they still consider this a BETA site).

Out of the sites that I’ve seen, this is currently the best home search (MLS search) site. Some features I like:

  • As you zoom in to your area, the number of available homes (based on your search criteria) gets updated. This works real fast demonstrating that the Windermere people have thought-through their spacial analysis backend.
  • It is integrated well into the standard MLS search. Nothing will surprise someone who has searched for a home on the internet.

If you are looking for a home in Seattle, I’d highly recommend the Windermere tool. Although there is some good news for all the other people building home search sites. The Beta site that Windermere has published does not do anything really innovative, so there is still plenty of room for someone to break the field wide open. I’m still waiting for someone to use the power of the web to improve search results.