Google Maps now has Real Estate Listings

If you hadn't noticed, Goggle Maps now has Real Estate Listings. To see what listings they have in the area your interested, go to http://maps.google.com and double click the map repeatedly to zoom in to the area your interested in. Next, click on the button titled "more". There should be a check box there that says "Real Estate" that you can check.



And here's a live link to this
Southern Michigan Google Real Estate Map

Here's how it looks as an iframe on your site:

View Larger Map

My First IFRAME, and it wasn't for Real Estate

I know IFRAMES gets used alot in Real Estate to display MLS listings, but I opted for a direct data feed with mine, so I never used IFRAMES for Real Estate Listings. Another opportunity came up for one of my other websites when a local paper asked if there was a way they could display trivia quizzes from another site that Innovative Ambitions owns. I thought of IFRAMES and went to work to see what I could come up with. This is just a rough first pass test, but let's see what it looks like. Here's a try at displaying one of our recent popular quizzes: Autumn Songs.

Even Google isn't perfect

Well, as I posted previously, my clients Real Estate website was dropped from the Google index early in 2008. The site had been hacked and had some blackhat SEO stuff added. I didn't catch it for a month or 2, then spent a couple more fixing and requesting reconsideration with Google. The pages went back into the index, and all was well. The clients site started coming up 1st for searches on "Remerica Somerset Realty". Case closed. Or so I thought.

Then late last year, or early this year, I noted something else. All the images at remericasomersetrealty.com had been dropped from the google image search index. Or at least thats all I can figure. Prior to the hack last spring the images from the site could be found in Google image search.

My assumption is that its not an issue with the Google algorythym, but rather with the Google re-inclusion process. I can't be sure, but when you have a site whose url is remericasomersetrealty.com, and it says "Remerica Somerset Realty" in the page title of the front page, and the upper left corner of every page on the site has an image whose filename is "remerica_somerset_realty.jpg" and the alt tag says "Remerica Somerset Realty" and the text on the actual image says "Remerica Somerset Realty", and the image shows up nowhere in Goggle image search results, but the site still shows up #1 for "Remerica Somerset Realty" in Google standard search, then I'd say that there's a relavency issue with this image search result, especially when you look at the other image search results that come up. And alot of them page 1 are nothing to write home about.

To be fair though, the Google system is extremely huge and dynamic, and everything can't possibly be fixed manually so I don't really fault Google. I just wish I could find a way to get my images back in the Google image search index. There's a process, and I've written them twice in the last 4 months, and been given no timeframe on how fast these requests get considered. :)

Interesting article and map in Zillow on home value changes

There's an article on Zillow that includes a map and shows the year over year housing value change using colored diamonds to allow you to get a really clear picture nation wide. No surprise to anyone keeping up. Florida, California, and the east coast appear hit the hardest (I.e values down) with a few down pockets around Detroit, Chicago, Green Bay and Minneapolis also down 13 to 20%, and Ann Arbor Michigan being hit especially hard. Prices across the heartland and mid south appear to have held value pretty well. How does that expression go? Our strength is in the heartland, or something like that.

Balloon or no Ballon, Refinancing your House might be worth it

I just finished refinnancing my house and it turned out quite well. The main reason that I did it was that I was on a 7 year ballloon that was coming up next year. For those of you that are as lacking in knowledge of mortgages and financing as myself that basically means that I took a lower interest rate but agreed that the rate could change after 7 years. So I wanted to redo the loan so I wouldn't be surprised by any shocking new interest rate next year.

In any event I found out that refinancing produced quite a few benefits for me and was probably worth doing at this point even if I hadn't felt the need to because of the balloon:

- It slightly lowered my monthly payment
- I get to skip a payment for the month of April
- It reduced the length of my remaining loan from 24 to 20 years
- I received an extra $1,500 or so back in the mail

Now in my case my banker said that part of the problem was that my taxes had been increased significantly, forcing the escrow to get a little messy, and that was costing me money. Additionally, I had others tell me it was because my "new loan" was for less money, but it was for the same amount of money that my old loan left off on, and I was paying a higher percentage amount on the principal for the old loan, so I'm still having a hard time swallowing that one.

Whatever the reasons, when you consider that the refinance charges were significant, it seems amazing to me that I could add to my debt but still come away in better shape.

The real shocker is that the interest went up, from 4.75% to over 5%, so the next time your shoping for loans and the focus has an over emphasis on the interest rate, be sure to check the monthly payment amount and the number of payments. Those are the numbers that hit your pocketbook in the end.

Housing Now as cheap as Renting according to some numbers

I heard someone talking the other day about numbers he's been tracking for quite a while on the cost of owning a home versus the cost of renting. He said that for the first time his numbers were showing the cost of owning a house going down enough to be comparable to the cost of renting. So for those of you who've saved a nest egg and are looking to go from renting to buying, now might be a great time to do it. Sellers have started to acknowledge the drop in market values and listing prices have come down as a result.

Adding Craigslist RSS Feeds to your site can be a good promotion

I've been carrying Craigslist RSS feeds on a clients Real Estate website for quite a while, and after sticking with these somewhat secondary pages on the site, I have to say that the effort has born some fruit.

If your not familiar with RSS, its an XML based file format that a sending and receiving party to share data easily. It's tag based, like html, but the main intention of XML and RSS is to transfer the content, with less emphasis on how it should be displayed (there are techniques to specify preferred display now with XML, but we'll leave that for another day).

To display others RSS feeds on your website, you need:
- A dynamic website with some language that can be run on yor webserver. I use PHP.
- An XML parse module (or you could write your own from scratch but it's not necessary)

The way it works is that, when someone hits a page on my site that contains an RSS feed, my website server dynamically goes and hits the RSS feed address of the other site, such as Craigslist, pulls the data back realtime, and parses it for display in html on my page. Keep in mind though that what your retriveing is not html and not ready for immediate display. You have to read the records and output them in html, just as any other dynamic webpage works.

RSS is a boiled down XML specification, and typically includes a list of "News stories" or items. Each item consists of title, description, author, date, and a link to the full article on the originators site (Yes there's something in it for them too).

Here's some stats from my clients site to show you how including craigslist pages have helped with traffic:

Top Entry pages for February 2008(Webalizer)
1 2779 4.58% 1374 27.90% /
2 178 0.29% 127 2.58% /listings/314.html
3 138 0.23% 107 2.17% /craigslistannarbor.html
4 140 0.23% 99 2.01% /craigslistdetroit.html
5 256 0.42% 83 1.69% /listings/lakeproperties.html
6 175 0.29% 76 1.54% /adminsect/rsr-links.html
7 139 0.23% 75 1.52% /listings/311.html
8 165 0.27% 73 1.48% /listings/vacant.html
9 161 0.27% 62 1.26% /lakesomerset.html
10 68 0.11% 57 1.16% /listings/139.html


Top Search Queries(Google Webmaster Tools)
1 27% remerica 9
2 16% michigan real estate listings 8
3 7% craigslist ann arbor mi 8
4 4% craigs list ann arbor mi 3
5 4% vacant land for sale in michigan 9
6 3% somerset michigan 9
7 3% remerica real estate 8
8 3% craigslist ann arbor michigan 9
9 3% craigslist for ann arbor mi 5
10 2% somerset mi 9
11 2% craigslist ann arbor 46


Top Content last 30 days (Google Analytics)
1. / 745 433 00:01:28 38.16% 32.35% $0.29
2. /listings/lakeproperties.html 351 181 00:00:57 35.00% 17.38% $0.17
3. /listings/vacant.html 205 125 00:00:43 52.50% 31.71% $0.08
4. /listings/residential.html 202 118 00:00:53 39.47% 23.27% $0.08
5. /listings/314.html 199 171 00:01:14 77.37% 65.33% $0.00
6. /index.php?framecontent=mls-drilldown-menu.php&county=Hillsdale 184 46 00:00:20 0.00% 1.63% $0.11
7. /southern-michigan-mls-county-index.html 182 87 00:00:20 10.00% 4.95% $0.23
8. /listings/311.html 157 122 00:00:55 66.67% 40.76% $0.00
9. /lakesomerset.html 150 113 00:01:11 41.18% 38.00% $0.13
10. /craigslistannarbor.html 143 120 00:04:36 83.90% 81.82% $0.00
11. /listings/223.html 137 82 00:00:58 20.00% 10.95% $0.00
12. /listings/all.html 130 67 00:01:02 27.27% 16.92% $0.07
13. /listings/326.html 121 80 00:00:32 50.00% 23.97% $0.12
14. /listings/319.html 119 61 00:00:42 39.47% 26.05% $0.08
15. /craigslistdetroit.html 118 98 00:04:21 82.47% 78.81% $0.10


To find the Page Address of RSS Feed for the Craigslist page you's like to add to your site and select your region (I think craigslist makes you select a region first). For me, that takes me to http://jxn.craigslist.org/
Then I select "Real Estate for Sale", and click on the Orange RSS Icon at the bottom right of the screen, as shown.




Don't worry about the format of the resulting page that you get; it may look strange because its rss/xml, not html. The important thing now is to grab the address from your browser bar. That's the address that any software you set up will need to refer to to pull the feed.

So the Craigslist's page for Jackson Michigan Commercial Listings is:
http://jxn.craigslist.org/off/

(Don't confuse that with the RSS feed address. To get that you would need to go to that page, scroll to the bottom, and click on the orange RSS link icon, as previously discussed).

You can see the result of subscribing to the feed by going to my clients site at
http://www.remericasomersetrealty.com/craigslistjackson.html

When Real Estate Boards Make Different Rules For The Same MLS Website

A little while back, I was working on getting MLS Listings into an clients website, when I noticed one of the listings had the Realtors info in the description. I thought it was odd because I had been told that was against the rules. On checking with the Real Estate Board that they were a member of, the person first told me that wasn't allowed and they would have to check. After checking, however, they came back and said that the listing in question came from another adjacent county, and a from a member of another board, and that each Board had their own set of rules on how they could put their listings in. Now most folks that have been involved with Real Estate and the MLS systems know that people put listings in, and then share them on each others websites. Most sites, when displaying these listings, try very hard to downplay the listing brokers info and use the page as an add for themselves. This is the main reason that some Realtors engage in the practice of putting their info - name, phone, company - in the description o try to get some exposure for themselves on their own listing.

The issue that I have with this is that, now I display their listings, and they are allowed to prominently display their info in the description on my page, but when they display my listings on their page, I'm not allowed to put my info in the description, effectively allowing them to more easily hide or downplay me as the listing broker. And this is all on the same website. Am I missing something or does that seem like a bit of an inequitable arrangement? For my client, who sits on the border of 3 counties, its especially tough.

Now to be fair to their local Real Estate Board, I tend to agree with them in that I don't think that the agents' info should go in the description. But in the end all the boards sharing this MLS Website need to negotiate common rules that better disallow hiding the listing brokers information.

Using Google Maps on your Real Estate Site

I've done a bit of work on the Real Estate website that I support for a client, so I thought I'd discuss a few things I learned about using Google maps with listings in your website.

When I first set up the clients site, I set up a little logic to dynamically put a link to a Google map showing the location of the property on a map. So, based on the address fields in the database, I would print out something like:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=14700 Hilltop Drive, Somerset, MI 49281&spn=0.026496,0.043460&hl=en

Where the address is, obviously, 14700 Hilltop Drive, Somerset, MI 49281.

This gives a map that looks as follows when clicked on:



The problem with this though, is that Google just can't resolve some addresses. It's not really Googles fault, as pinpointing a location on a map based on a street address is prone to all kinds of problems. I'll give just one example of that.

My client lives in a rural area of Michigan. When post offices were first created in the area in the early part of the century, the locations were based on the towns that thrived around the railroad (believe it or not). A couple of these junctions were the towns of Cement City and Jerome. These towns, and Jerome in particular, are quite small. In the last 20 or 30 years, Lake communities have spring up at both Lake Somerset and Lake LeAnn whose populations are much larger. But mailing addresses for many around Lake Somerset are still Cement City to this day. Likewise, many homes around Lake LeAnn still have mailing addresses of Jerome, even though its several miles away.

Ok enough of the example. What's a better method than using mailing addresses to create a map? The best way is to use latitude and longitude and create a slightly different link, that would look as follows:

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=42.05202,-84.385208&ie=UTF8&ll=42.05202,-84.385208&spn=0.06326,0.129089&z=15

The Google page that comes up when you click on the link looks like this:



While the accuracy is good you'll notice that the location on the map is labeled only by the latitude and longitude this time, which isn't as nice. I suspect that there's a way to correct that by adding other parameters to the url but I haven't had time to tinker with it. If your interested, you can find some Google Maps parameter info here.

In addition to the above described techniques, its also quite easy to embed static google maps on a website. Just use Google maps, and when you get the map you'd like to embed on your website, click the "link" link just above the map to the right, as shown below:



Then paste the resulting code into your website in the spot you want to use it. I did find though, that Google won't allow you to use that as a template and dynamically alter the parameters to show different maps. Your given an ID and its good for that one map.

To get really serious about utilizing Google maps in your Real Estate or other map related website, check out the Google Maps API. With this you can do quite a bit more than anything I've described above.