Earlier this month an excellent application of Google Earth for real estate was released at coloradofuture.com (use their interface to search for houses, then select the Google Earth listings). These guys have taken their house listings and put them into Google Earth so you can look around their region of Colorado and find houses within your price range, look at the property within GE, or look for detailed information on the listing at their web site.
Google Earth is obviously a powerful potential tool for learning more about an area surrounding some real estate you are interested in. You can check for nearby things like grocery stores, malls, railroad tracks, and ATMs. You can look for hazards such as trash dumps, flood plains, and unwanted commercial buildings or traffic. And, as more cities include access to their GIS data (like the City of Portland), you will have even more powerful data to access within GE.
Significantly, the Google Earth team claims they have already had numerous people contact them that they had purchased buildings based on the input they gathered from Google Earth.
This real estate application was announced in this post at the GE Community BBS. Already, another real estate listing was mentioned in the thread as available in Florida.
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
I am a real estate investor and I want to use GE un Manhattans real estate life. Could GE have the interior of each particular building?
Yes, you can build 3D models of buildings using a tool like SketchUp which have modelled interiors as well as exteriors. However, GE is not ideal for viewing interiors in its current release because you can not easily control camera views.
I am working with the Google Earth application to provide listing information for the Northern Virginia area. I found the pkzip command line application to be very useful in commpressing the data in my kml files to kmz files that are very quick to download. Have a look at ListingMap.net to see how easy it is. I am working to get a licence to the access live Mris data for data on the fly.
Right now the data resides on my own server and is updated once a day.
These files in kml form are 6 to 11 megabytes, but in kmz form are less that 1 megabyte. If anyone out there is writing there own application I highly recommend using Pkzipc to create kmz files.
-Cheers
-Matthew
Google earth can be used to calulate area,you can also Create Enlarge view of any city having size 10 X 10 feets, but it is teduous work of patching small small image to get high resolution.
Does GE provide us latest and up to date foreclosure listings?
Here’s another website that uses Google Earth (Google Maps, more specifically) for Real Estate Listings: http://www.newplat.com
Anyone know where the technology to build Google Earth Enabled Real estate Websites is available?
Thanks
I have a Real Estate Website based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. If I devote a page to a particular property, how do I have a link on that page to direct lookers to a Google map showing the location of that home??
I am building a website for a real estate developer. I would like to incorporate Google Earth to show the properties and only the properties they have built with a pop-up bubble that gives basic info.
I use it on all of my real estate sites. And it is the best think ever.
Don’t some of the widgets at Trulia and Zillow allow for a similar function?
Google Earth is a good way for buyers to locate houses that they are interested in so that they can have a “preview” of the property before actually going there.
After reading this interesting article, we will get our programmers to integrate google earth feature into our search for new property listings.
Jeff
As far as I can tell, this is only the beginning of how various technological innovations are going to influence the profession of real estate agent (and many other professions). I’m excited about what the future holds, as apps like this get increasingly up-leveled.
I love what Google Earth allows me to do for my clients (buyers). I’m always interested in seeing the up and ever improving changes being made. I recommend this to everyone who is in real estate.
This article might be a little dated, but Google Earth really helps me a lot in my daily activities at work.
Personally, I’ve always used Google Earth in order to check out the surrounding areas of a property before heading out in person to check it out. The view of the neighborhood from Google Earth alone, let’s me know if it’s an area that I would consider living in. It’s an amazing, useful tool that will change the real estate game forever.