Providing Value to Potential Home Buyers Moving to Your Area
By Drew Meyers | September 17, 2007
Kris Berg is a genius. Or maybe it’s her husband Steve. It doesn’t really matter. Regardless of whether it’s Steve or Kris (or both), they are doing an awesome job with their website, SanDiegoCastes.com. The site is a valuable resource for home buyers interested in living in San Diego — with market stats, floor plans, links, and of course properties for sale. On the San Diego Home Blog, Kris mentioned that they have a new addition — a Google maps mash-up to display neighborhood information and boundaries. SanDiegoCastes.com now has a separate neighborhoods page that uses Google maps to display neighborhood boundaries and links to an overview of each neighborhood. For example, here is the overview page for San Lucena and another for Ivy Hill & Ivy Crest.
It looks like all the coding is done in PHP (I think), so I imagine a developer could integrate this type of information into a wordpress blog. I just realized the website is powered by Ubertor, so their tech team might have done this setup for other agent websites as well.
It’s no secret that most people are visual — so a map is an absolutely fantastic way to give prospective home buyers a better idea about the potential neighborhoods within a desired area. If I was a real estate professional aiming to build a valuable resource for home buyers, this is definitely one of the things I would add to my website.
Kris and Steve — congratulations on a website well done!
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Author's Website: http://www.zillow.com
5 Responses to “Providing Value to Potential Home Buyers Moving to Your Area”
Comments
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September 17th, 2007 at 3:57 pm
I agree, Kris and Steve are awesome. They are an excellent example of agents that use almost every function of our system.
(Our system is built in PHP and Ruby)
Shameless plug: anyone wanting to try our system can setup a site for 30 days free. http://order.ubertor.com/signup
September 17th, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Since you’re a contributor here, I guess I’ll let the shameless plug go
September 18th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
Steve, congratulations on an excellent use of mapping mashups. The Berg’s are providing the information that real estate customers want to see and how they want to see it. If they would compliment this “context” with comprehensive home listings, then they would have a truly useful system for home buyers and sellers.
I have been looking hard for a solution like this for Zolve with very little luck. Being able to employ “click-able” polygons offers much potential.
September 22nd, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Drew, Five days late to the party. Thank you so much for the mention, and I am glad to hear you like the mash-up. It is a work in progress, and you can see we have a lot more territory to cover. Genius? Even I think this is a bit of a stretch.
Uber-Steve, I’ll help you with your product plug. This is a little mash-up I did myself, but it was soooo easily integrated into the Ubertor site. The “Better Know a Neighborhood” overviews themselves were originally posted on our blog, and I have been reproducing them on the website over time. Cross-contamination at its best! The ability to link from the Google maps and info bubble directly to the corresponding page is something for which I will have to give Google the big props. Next up is improving our wall of words entry page with something more visually inviting (to be named later).
Brian - We do have the comprehensive home listings courtesy of our current idx provider, but these are not in the pretty map-based format. I have been toying with the idea of marrying the map-driven search provided by RealBird with the the presentation of our current provider. I’ll keep you posted.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
What is the general concensus on pre-compiled neighborhood map boundaries that are available commercially?