Google is not about to be outdone by Trulia and Zillow in the real estate search department. On Friday they announced their new upgraded real estate search tool with a YouTube video.
The best thing it does is combine things that Google already does with its new real estate search platform. My favorite feature is the ability to explore neighborhoods with Google Street View. “Walk” around and see the architecture of neighboring buildings, view area businesses and more. Click on any property and, of course, Google links to the real estate broker’s site so that you can quickly see any exterior or interior photos the agent may have taken as well as details about the property.
If you want to move down the block, just slide the map and all of the results will update automatically. It also employs Google’s new Search Layers, which are pretty neat. Now you’re not limited to the top 10 search results. Businesses are now plotted by little red circles. Click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top 10 results still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map. Take it for a spin:
Tom Downey wrote:
It was only a matter of time. I find clients are very confused about where to go for on line real estate searches and tend to fall into one and stay there. The most important thing is to have up to date information so that you are not wasting your time looking at listings that have already sold or been pulled from the market. Our MLS refreshes this information every 15 minutes but sites like http://www.facebook.com/l/;Realtor.com or Trulia usually only do it every 24 hours. It’d be interesting to know how often and where google is pulling their data from. Zillow is driven by the information they glean from county records which can be very inaccurate so I always take the valuations from Zillow with a grain of salt.
Another good article. Thanks.
Tom,
So long as the data isn’t terribly out of date (meaning more than a week or so), it’s not bad to at least get the contact. Maybe you have another home listed that is similar? No, it’s not bait and switch. Unless people get aggravated (and in this case, you can honestly say it’s not your fault), getting a new contact is always a good thing.
Charles
This is awesome! I wish they would have had this about a year ago. Even if the listings aren’t completely up to the hour, at least you could search the neighborhoods that have a lot of properties for sale to see what they have to offer or if they are even somewhere you would like to live.