real estate

Using Google Earth tour builder as a real estate agent

July 2, 2014

Since the introduction of Google Earth nearly a decade ago, it has been a great tool for real estate agents. One of the earliest examples was when Trulia added Google Earth support for real estate searches back in 2006. We’ve also seen property visualizations, Re/Max using Google Earth and many others.

Thanks to improved tools in recent years, particularly related to embedding Google Earth on websites, we’ve seen many other amazing pieces come along. A great example is what some agents are doing with Google Earth’s Tour Builder. An example is this handy tour of a home, which shows a variety of amenities and stores nearby to help give potential buyers a solid understanding of the area.

A great explanation of how realtors can use the tool came from Jason Fox, a realtor who has build some himself. From Fox’s blog:

By utilizing the Google Earth Application you can easily zoom around your community, neighborhood, city, or county and place a pin on the location you would like to highlight. Then add up to 25 Photos or Videos, Description, Title, Pin Style, and pan and zoom into your highlighted area to capture what you want your audience to see.

Once you have completed your tour you can share it with your client with a link to opens the Tour of your community.

(via Inman News)

Excellent property and data visualizations in Google Earth

October 11, 2013

Google Earth is an amazing tool to visualize trends and growth when it comes to real estate. In the past we’ve shown you some tools that use historical imagery to show how things have changed, such as Google’s Timelapse project and this impressive visualization of urban growth in Spain.

Today we wanted to show you three impressive videos that use Google Earth to show historical real estate information in a very compelling way. They take three major american cities (Chicago, New York, San Francisco) and show the growth of them over the past 150 years. The videos begin with a flat city, then slowly begin dropping in colored polygons for the buildings in the order in which they were built.

It’s an impressive set of videos and a very effective way to show this kind of growth.

You can read more about these on The Source website.

View Honolulu housing prices in Google Earth

August 2, 2013

Michele Argiolas at Valuegis has been putting together some great visualizations of housing prices in Honolulu, using vibrant colors and a variety of datasets. The result is awesome images like the one seen here:

The chart shows the median household available income to purchase a 100 sq meter house at current prices, using a variety of data sources. You can try it yourself by downloading this KMZ file. You can read a bit more about their Honolulu map on their Facebook Page.

They’ve also done some other great work regarding market offer prices and Capitalization Rate spatial distribution in Italy and Spain. Their use of bright colors makes the visualizations easy to understand, and the raw KMZ files for each makes them easy to download and use.