Posts by Andrew Mattie

I’m really happy to say that the version 3 beta of the Local Market Explorer WordPress plugin is finally available for everyone to try out. For those who don’t know what Local Market Explorer is, it’s a way to embed local area info from Zillow, Education.com, Walk Score, Yelp, TeachStreet, and Nile Guide directly into [...]

The final release of version 2 of the Local Market Explorer WordPress Plugin is still a week or so away, but for the adventurous, we’re making available a beta version to try out. I feel pretty confident that there aren’t major bugs though, so you should be perfectly safe with the upgrade (if you’re currently [...]

I’m not sure about you, but I haven’t quite been able to grasp what’s happening in California with all of the data sharing proposals and MLS merger announcements that have been hitting the wire in the past year. I’ve now heard of Quattro, CARETS, and MLSAlliance, and now CALMLS, and I couldn’t figure out what [...]

I haven’t had much time lately to keep up with my real estate tech news readings, so maybe I missed this announcement on another site. Either way, Microsoft’s absolutely incredible Photosynth technology has been released to the public for a bit over two weeks now, and already I’m starting to see some pretty cool virtual [...]

I read some stuff the other day about how the talented crew over at Estately recently launched into the Portland, OR market, and one of the stupid MLS rules (my opinion) they had to face triggered some memories of frustrations I had faced when I loaded the Portland data into our own IDX system. I’ll [...]

Over at the official Google Maps API blog, there’s an announcement that Google’s Street View functionality is now accessible programmatically via an API (that’s Application Programming Interface, for those who either didn’t know or just took that acronym for granted). What this means for agents, brokers, and vendors is that applications can now be created [...]

At the time of this writing, Apple is holding a press release to announce their API for the iPhone; you can check out the live feed here. They’ve announced a lot of really incredible stuff so far, but the part that I was most intrigued with is this: We have a complete set of APIs [...]

When Zillow released their neighborhood data last Wednesday night, I was floored. My company had talked about trying to acquire similar data off and on over the past two years, but it was always too cost prohibitive to do so. As I thought about the magnitude of what they had done that night, I realized [...]

The other day, Drew Meyers pointed me to a post in the Zillow forums where someone was asking some very interesting (and seemingly common) questions about IDX. The individual wanted to know what IDX essentially is and whether or not someone could create a program that could easily search across all real estate listings on [...]

Hey there GeekEstate Blog readers. My name is Andrew Mattie, and I’m a senior software engineer over at Diverse Solutions. I was recently approached by Drew and asked if I wanted to contribute my knowledge and expertise to the GeekEstate Blog, and after thinking about it for exactly .482 seconds, I realized that I’d be [...]