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Real estate agent puts MLS listings on Google Earth

Inman News

Google Earth put the world- at least a computerized version of it -at computer users' fingertips, and a real estate agent in Idaho has put a new spin on property listings by sprinkling local MLS data on this digital globe.

Bill Clark, an agent at Holland Realty in Boise, unified county property records and multiple listing service information and packaged this data for display on the Google Earth application. Google Earth allows users to zoom in and out on a map and to rotate and tilt the map view. In order to view property listings, computer users must first install Google Earth, a free program, and then download property listings from Clark's Earth Point Web site, at www.earthpoint.us.

Properties are color-coded by price, and listings that appeared on the local MLS within the past week are represented with a star-shaped symbol while other properties are represented by a diamond-shaped symbol. The Google Earth representation of the MLS properties shows parcel outlines, based on county records, and users can click on property icons for property descriptions and photos.

Clark said he worked on the project for about eight months, and the Google Earth-based MLS search capability launched about two months ago. The property listings information is supplied by the Intermountain MLS in Boise, the largest MLS in the state.

There are about 4,000 property listings in Ada and Canyon counties available for viewing via Clark's Google Earth integration, including about 3,200 listings of homes for sale. The property listings are updated daily, he said.

Flyover views are nothing new for Clark, who has maintained a pilot's license since high school and developed a private residential airport with his neighbors. Even so, he said he was dazzled when he first saw the Google Earth tool, which allows viewers to zoom in on any part of the planet – from outer space to a rooftop view. "I saw Google Earth and I just said, 'Holy cow,'" he said.

There are a handful of other real estate-related companies that have offered property listings data for the Google Earth site - Point2, Propsmart.com and ForSaleByOwnerCenter.com are among those that have announced Google Earth integration.

A larger group of real estate sites are using the Google Maps-based platform to display property listings. There are other pluses and minuses to each mapping tool: Google Earth views offer added dimension and customization compared to Google Maps, while Google Maps is a streamlined and simplified mapping tool that operates in a Web browser and doesn't require a data download.

In March, the author of the Google Earth Blog promoted Clark's work, which he said "shows more information, and with more accuracy, than any other real estate listing service I've seen to date."

Greg Manship, director for the Intermountain MLS, said he isn't sure whether a lot of real estate agents in the area are using Clark's tool, though he is familiar with the technology. "He came over and gave us a demo," Manship said. "I've talked to Bill quite a lot about the concept. It's expanding on the IDX data using new technologies that are available."

Another company in the area, Genius Realty, is displaying the MLS data in a Google Maps format at its Web site. Heinrich Wiebe, a manager at Genius Realty, said the company's mapping tool launched about two months ago and is popular with consumers. "Our position is – give them the data," he said.

Heinrich and co-manager Matt Newbill said they are familiar with Clark's Google Earth integration. "It's pretty complex for just your typical end-user," Newbill said. "People are pretty impatient when they're on the Web. The less hoops the better. We don't require logins or passwords to get the data- it's just come and get it."

He also said that consumers are empowered by new property-search tools. "It used to be that only the real estate agents held the data. They are no longer held hostage."

Clark said that his Google Earth integration is a useful tool for listings presentations, and he believes there is a rich future for real estate-related mapping applications. "I'm convinced this is going to be successful and grow. I think in a couple years this will be the standard," he said.

There is a huge community of developers who are building integrations with Google Earth for other purposes, he said, such as map locators for speed-monitoring cameras on European roads and for National Geographic feature articles. "That gave me enough confidence to say there are enough people who,when they see this, they're not going to go anywhere else. Once you have a customer using this they're not going to go back to the old method," Clark said.

"What makes Earth Point special ... is that you use the map itself to hunt for property. Thus, Google Earth becomes the primary interface to the MLS," he said. By contrast, some traditional property-search sites use maps as a secondary source for finding properties, he said.

With those sites, he said, "you enter search criteria on the screen, get this list, and say, 'Well, that's interesting, I wonder where that is," and then map this property. (Mapping) is the last step of your process. Google Earth is the other way around - you can just go hunting like you're in a helicopter. I think it's making it a lot easier to wade through all that data."

The Earth Point project has been rewarding, though it was "a long road" to get it off the ground. It took him about four or five months of work before his first success in getting properties to show up on Google Earth. "When I saw that first dot show up on the map ... I just fell over. That was gratifying. It was a huge challenge. It took me three months to that 'Yes, it really would work.' When I started out there was no one to turn to."

Before he took on the project, Clark worked in the manufacturing industry, and the challenge of integrating property data with Google Earth drew upon his interests in computer programming, mathematics and navigation. "I have flown several times across the U.S. using just a watch and a compass for navigation ... and have done weeklong treks in the Idaho wilderness with even less," he said.

Clark said he would like to add a new layer of information to his Google Earth integration, such as museums and other public attractions. He has also considered mapping local garage sales.

In addition to existing properties, Clark has mapped several new housing developments on Google Earth using developers' subdivision maps. In the future, he said he would consider charging a fee to promote new developments using Google Earth. "The master plan would appear, along with a description of amenities and a link to the subdivision Web site," he said. "Once construction is under way, the links would be geared to the home buyer. They could learn more about the house being built, available options, history of the builder, etc. All this would happen well before anything appeared on the MLS."

Copyright 2006 Inman News

Selling Your Home? Make It Stand Out

April 25, 2006 Post Tribune

Ask someone in the real estate industry how business has been lately and they're likely to tell you it has slowed down compared to last year. With mortgage rates rising, fewer people are in a hurry to move, and houses are staying on the market longer.

As a result of the increase in inventory, sellers are losing their ability to get top dollar. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) says pending home sales are already showing signs of leveling out, indicating the housing market is entering a period of stabilization. Existing home sales are projected to drop 6 percent to 6.65 million this year from a record of 7.08 million in 2005.

But if you have to sell anyway because of a move, job relocation or for some other reason, there are steps you can take to make your property stand out from the rest.

Mark Fortune is a Re/Max Realtor whose territory covers most of Southern California. He says first impressions are critical. "When you walk up the driveway with a potential buyer, they want to see pride of ownership. If they don't feel good about the looks on the outside, they'll find flaws on the inside too. It's critical that your home have curb appeal if you want it to sell," he says.

That means trimming the trees, resurfacing the driveway, keeping the lawn mowed and the plants well manicured. Whatever it takes to make it look nicer than the neighboring homes on your street.

Inside, Fortune recommends sellers paint any rooms that need it, replace broken tiles and dirty carpet and remove the clutter. "You want a potential buyer to feel like they can just move in and take up residence. Not like they'll have to do a lot of work to get the home up to their standards," says Fortune.

Once you're ready to list your home, seek out an agent who is up on the latest trends. "Agents used to just put a sign out front, take out an ad in the local paper and wait for people to come. But the real estate industry has evolved a lot in the past few years and the old ways of doing things no longer suffice," says Brendan King, chief operating officer at Point2 Technologies, a software technology company specializing in online marketing tools for real estate professionals. "Online is where people are beginning their search for their new home, and they're going to a number of different sites for this information. If you want your home to sell, your listing needs to show up on as many sites as possible."

Realizing the importance of the Internet, Fortune signed on for the Point2 Agent software about 18 months ago to drive his marketing efforts in that area. He says he really appreciates having the ability to instantly gain widespread exposure for his listings.

Here's how the program works. First the agent's listings are captured from his or her Point2 Agent website and featured on www.point2homes.com. Then they are automatically syndicated to the most popular real estate search sites, including Google Base, Yahoo! Classifieds, Trulia and Oodle.

Fortune says he also appreciates the feature that allows him to easily put up multiple photos with each listing. According to a survey done by the National Association of Realtors, photos are critical. Eighty-four percent of consumers surveyed ranked them as the most useful feature in the online home shopping experience. "Agents who use our software can put up to 25 photos with each of their listings, so potential buyers can get a real good idea of what the house looks like before ever setting foot inside," says King.

"I've had people call me up from half way across the world to make appointments to see houses they found online. Multiple photos and solid exposure on the Internet really do a good job of helping sell the property," says Fortune.

So do the sellers themselves. When working with a Realtor who uses the Point2 Agent software, homeowners have the unique ability to log in and add personal comments to the listing. They can tell potential buyers such things as what makes the property unique, how great the neighbors are, information about the schools, etc.

To find a Point2 agent in the region you're shopping in, or to see what your listing should look like online, log on to www.point2homes.com.

What a national real estate MLS might look like

Inman News

The idea of a national multiple listing service has been floating around for years. Lately, with the arrival of Google Base and consolidation of some large MLSs, the talk of a national MLS is heating up again.

It makes one wonder, what would or should a national MLS look like? That depends on one's point of view. One of the most common definitions for MLS is a group of brokers joined together in a cooperative marketing organization for the purpose of pooling their respective property listings. In exchange for a potentially larger audience of home buyers, the brokers agree to share commissions.

This seems like a fairly accurate description. So in some ways the MLS is a marketing organization in which brokers "share" their "marketing assets" (listings) with other brokers.

Realtors clearly favor a national or some form of consolidated MLS, at least at a state level, according to the recent National Association of Realtors' 2006 MLS Technology Survey. The survey also highlighted a few reasons why, including:

- The expanding market areas for brokers across MLS lines;
- The cost and inefficiency of belonging to multiple MLSs;
- The cost and difficulty of data aggregation across multiple MLSs; and
- The need for MLSs to provide improved services in response to new competitors entering the real estate industry.

Before I return to musings about what a national MLS should look like, I will point out some problems with the current structure of the some 960 MLSs out there.

1. Data Control

Brokers can't effectively control with whom they share their marketing assets, which leads to many problems, including:

• Brokers can't measure how their marketing partners are contributing to the cooperative (if at all) -- i.e., do the partners bring "marketing assets" and/or buyers, or are they simply bringing a fork to the potluck, as Dave Liniger puts it?
  
  
• Brokers have no control over the integrity and reputation of others who are using their listings and therefore, their reputations are connected with these people as marketing partners – guilt by association.
  
  
• Brokers have limited access to the data (marketing assets) they provide to the MLS, and they have to effectively pay to get it back.
  
  
• Brokers have restrictions on how they may use their own and others' marketing assets.
  
  
• Brokers cannot reuse marketing assets for other marketing activity such as vertical search, partner Web sites, print, etc. This necessitates multiple re-entry of the data for things like Google Base, Trulia, Oodle, Realestate.com, Yahoo! Classifieds and others.
  
  
• Brokers have no control or insight into the level of service provided by the marketing partners forced on them -- thus lies the difficulty in sharing commissions properly based on the amount of work and value the partner brings. Equal pay for equal work seems to not apply in the current MLS structure.
  
  
  
  

2. Data Structure

Brokers in many cases have little or no flexibility over the data types and data quality they can provide.

Brokers and agents are the experts on marketing their listings, yet they have very little control of the makeup of the data set. They are limited in qualitative descriptions, photos, sound, virtual tours and neighborhood information. The limited and rigid structure of the data doesn't allow brokers to accommodate the type of marketing information that consumers expect and sellers are willing to provide.

The heterogeneous data sets from more than 960 MLSs make for a fractured broker and consumer experience. The broker has to enter data in many different forms, and the consumer's viewing experience is different with each one.

3. Data Types

MLSs are unable or unwilling to provide for the new types of marketing assets that brokers will need in the future.

• Current MLSs do not contain all the homes truly available for sale, only those under contract. Many new homes, if not under contract, are not included and for-sale-by-owner properties, foreclosures, rentals and vacation properties are not handled properly or at all.

What does this mean?

As a result, brokers are unable to satisfy the current demands of consumers, let alone the ever-increasing demands of the future information-empowered consumer.

What a New National MLS Might Look Like

What might a new national MLS look like and how could it solve the problems enumerated above? I'll step out on a limb and describe how I think it ought to look, with the following characteristics:

• A flexible homogenous data structure: This means that it could be a bungalow in Toronto and a Rancher in Texas, but it is still one data field that is the same everywhere.
  
  
• Ability to accommodate homes not necessarily under contract such as new homes, FSBOs, foreclosures, rentals and vacation properties.
  
  
• Complete broker control -- after all they are the ones who really own the data: Brokers would have complete control over the "who, what and where" of their listings or marketing assets. Brokers could then choose to only share marketing assets with those who bring something to the table (i.e., other marketing assets or buyers). Brokers would have very fine-grained control capabilities and could use their data in any manner they desire that is authorized by the providing broker.

• Automatic branded syndication of data: Easy and automatic data flow to any media (Google, Yahoo! Realestate.com, newsprint, partner Web sites, etc.) that brokers completely control and could opt out of on a case by case basis;

• A democratic community-based rating system, much like the eBay sellers rating that would give brokers insight into their marketing partners. This would show what marketing partners are contributing assets and buyers, work ethic and integrity of agents to help decide who their marketing partners will be, response time rating, service levels of marketing partners to help decide commission splits (based on the principle of equal pay for equal work), consumer satisfaction ratings, referral satisfaction ratings, and data integrity ratings reflecting data timeliness and completeness.

• Ability to allow home sellers to participate – for example, top 10 things sellers will miss about their homes and neighborhoods.

• Unlimited photos, descriptions, audio, tours, etc. – in short, allow brokers to fully utilize their marketing expertise.

Brendan King is the chief operating officer of Point2 Technologies Inc., Realty Solutions, which provides online marketing and eBusiness software for the real estate and heavy equipment industries.

Copyright 2006 Inman News

See Brendan's blog for a behind-the-scenes peek at Point2 Agent and regular commentary on the state of the industry.

Home Search Goes Vertical

Jessica Swesey
Inman News

Part 2: New era of real estate search

Editor's note: Real estate search has entered a new phase with the emergence of applications that narrow the hunt for consumers, pool from multiple sources, and enable consumers to search without having to register at a broker site to gain access. In this four-part series, we examine the latest tools and how they're impacting where brokers market properties and how consumers find them.

The options for online real estate hunting are dizzying. There's Realtor.com, which culls listings from multiple listing services around the country but shows only Realtor-represented properties. There are local broker sites, which can vary greatly in what they display. You could check local newspapers, but their inventory also varies from town to town.

Major search portals like Yahoo! and AOL show listings through partnerships with brokers or Realtor.com.

Real estate search is now entering a new phase with the emergence of new search applications, known as verticals, that narrow the hunt for consumers and drive more targeted traffic to brokers' online listings.

A few of these vertical applications include Trulia and Propsmart in the real estate listings category and Oodle and LiveDeal for online classifieds, which include real estate for sale and rental categories.

"Vertical search is all about taking one step closer to solving a narrower problem," said Oodle CEO Craig Donato. "By not trying to do everything, you can try to solve one specific problem in a deeper way."

Vertical search isn't new. Sites for job searching, shopping and finding blog entries have existed for years.

Today, there are more applications launching that are specifically geared toward home listings. The next-generation of Internet companies in this field offer community, transparency, a simpler user experience and information culled from a number of sources.

"There was a big, unmet need in a friendly, easy-to-use real estate search site," said Ron Hornbaker, Propsmart's president and chief technology officer. The software specialist launched Propsmart in December after being disappointed with sites, particularly Realtor.com, where users have to spend time filling out a form to gain access to limited information.

Propsmart.com gets some listings through partnerships with real estate technology providers Point2 Technologies, Number One Expert and others, and it also pools property listings summaries from brokerage, for-sale-by-owner and other Web sites. Site users can search, sort and map the inventory.

Hornbaker, who created the popular Bookcrossing.com site, says the key to success is to build a good user experience, not just a good search engine. Propsmart users can edit listings when they see information that's not correct. "If people notice a map marker being off, it's easy for anyone to change that," he said.

The site also includes forums where people can start discussions.

Propsmart has made its real estate search function available on Google's personalized home page, Hornbaker said. People can create a customized Google page and include a box to search real estate listings from Propsmart by clicking on Google's "personalized home page" option, then choosing the real estate search function from the list of content.

"It's that sort of openness that is meant by the term 'Web 2.0,'" he said. "It's an openness in the data and working with other Web sites."

Propsmart launched on the heels of competitor Trulia.com, a vertical search engine for real estate listings in California and New York. Trulia searches multiple brokerage Web sites for property listings and displays that information at its Web site, with links back to the broker sites. Trulia also incorporates historical information such as ownership history into most property listings.

A big distinguisher between new real estate search applications and old is that consumers can sift through listings without having to fill out a form that essentially turns them into a lead for brokers and agents. Once consumers at Trulia find a home they're interested in, they click through to the broker's site, but until then they can shop anonymously.

Vertical search applications have also evolved for online classifieds in the last year. LiveDeal has seen its real estate category grow since launching in 2004 and the company expects to have nearly half a million real estate listings in the next six months, according to founder and CEO Rajesh Navar.

"We do see agents coming in and adding inventory for advertising homes for sale," said Navar, a former engineer and manager for eBay and who founded and built eBay's search team.

LiveDeal connects local buyers and sellers much like traditional classifieds, and it provides searchable categories in cities nationwide.

Real estate listings are free for consumers and agents, he said, and the company soon will offer special packages for agents that will enable them to sign up for enhanced stores or pay-for-performance. Also, within the next year, LiveDeal will enable real estate agents to upload their own video tours, maps and other features.

The site also has a free rental listings category, which Navar said he expects to pick up this year.

"This will be the year for real estate for us," he said.

Classifieds search engine Oodle also is expanding its real estate category by working with brokerages such as Weichert Realtors and ZipRealty, Donato said. "We're also going to sites that have specific functionality like FSBO (for sale by owner) sites and foreclosure sites."

Donato says that as vertical search gets more sophisticated, people will stop thinking of it as a search engine and instead view it as an application, which will spark a lot of new innovation as people start thinking about what other tools consumer need when looking for a home.

A recent JupiterResearch paper predicts that vertical search sites will be a hot spot for online advertisers in the next five years.

A report, "Search Engine Selection Strategies," revealed that one-third of sophisticated marketers found that adding new search engines to their advertising campaigns increased their click rates.

"Increasing competition and rising keyword prices should motivate search marketers to look for newer, viable opportunities to diversify their incoming traffic," Sapna Satagopan, research associate at JupiterResearch, said in a statement.