Google Improves Real Estate Map Searching

Published July 08, 2009

The search giant Google is starting to take serious competitive steps into the real estate search market as tools like Trulia and Zillow gain increasing traffic. Google has ramped up real estate search functionality within its mapping service maps.google.com/realestate. Slowly the search giant has been improving its real estate listing search, which has been available for years.

This move is no surprise for anybody following the real estate industry. Google has been gathering agent and broker idx listing data silently for years giving them wide market coverage. From the Lat Long Google blog:

You'll notice that we've made some other enhancements that will improve your real estate searching experience. We've added lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.

This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a BART stop. You can also pan the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is more your speed.

Currently, Google is only displaying these real estate search results within its mapping application. If they decide to build out the feature set, it may only be time until Google starts deploying these results within their SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) similar to local business listings displayed towards the top of a search result page. If and when they make this move, the search giant will garner major penetration in the real estate search market. This could become a large source of Internet leads for many listing agents and I would hope Google would build out more functionality geared toward this user base.

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