Realtor innovator Bill Clark of Earthpoint.us first introduced an innovative interface for finding houses in Boise, Idaho using Google Earth. He has continued to innovate with real estate interfaces since that time. In particular, he has created a number of useful tools for projecting the US Public Land Survey System (read a Wikipedia article about PLSS). Using his Township and Range web site you can determine what township a property belongs to and plot it in Google Earth and compare the land to the satellite photos. It also lets you load files to view different datasets of the townships as overlays in Google Earth.
Bill has also released a set of detailed instructions on his blog for how you can generate a parcel map of a property with the help of the township data and a plat map. This could be interesting to those of you who are casual real estate owners and do not have access to GIS applications. (Note: the data is for information purposes and does NOT serve as a real survey.)
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.
Very cool… But looks pretty complicated too. I attempted to do an overlay api for plotting petroleum gas wells by lat. and long. on a few jobs I surveyed in Tarrant County, Texas. Unfortunately, didn’t have the time to get bugs worked out. Thanks for a good review!
—Adam