Real Estate Google Map Mash-Ups

By | November 13, 2005

Real estate info is obviously extremely suitable for being paired up with Google maps. Two sites my brother recently told me about are Home Price Records and Trulia. These sites serve complementary purposes – Home Price Records lists properties that have been sold and Trulia lists properties that are for sale.

Home Price Records prompts you to enter an address and some basic search criteria (number of bedrooms, square footage, and price range), and then it presents a list view of nearby properties meeting your search criteria. You can switch to map view to take advantage of the Google Maps integration.

Trulia is currently in beta release and allows you to search for houses in California. If you click on the More Options link, you get access to the same search criteria as Home Price Records, with the addition of number of bathrooms. Trulia listings typically include a photo of the property.

While the additional info available at Trulia is obviously more important for properties that are still for sale, Home Price Records would be a more useful site for assessing the value of one’s own home if it also provided this information. Trulia does not use MLS info, so it indexes sites, like real estate broker sites, that provide their own info. It would be a bit trickier for Home Price Records to present the extra day, as they would likely need to cache all this info long after the real estate brokers removed it from their sites. But, hard drives are pretty cheap these days.

Update 11/21/2005: Another complementary Google map mash-up is at For Sale by Owner Center. The listings are kind of sparse in Northern California, but there are houses listed for sale all across the country. In some areas, there are quite a few houses listed. You can directly contact the owner, as well as view the house via Google Earth. Listings can be filtered by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, and date listed, as well as sorted by all of those plus square footage. Listings are free for the owners of the homes.

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