We’re pleased to announce PropertyMaps.com has been acquired!!  Here’s a quick excerpt from the press release:

Austin entrepreneur Jeff Chambers, former U.S. product director for HomeAway, Inc., has acquired PropertyMaps.com, a leading residential real estate search engine. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Real estate has been one of the hardest hit sectors during the recent slow down in the US economy.  However, that pressure created a unique opportunity for Chambers to redefine the structure of a successful real estate company to best serve customers in an evolving marketplace.

“Despite the struggles in residential real estate over the last two years, we believe PropertyMaps.com’s superior technology platform gives us the ability to enter into the market and compete on the national stage.  We will leverage our technical expertise to connect consumers, agents and advertisers like never before, and we’ll do it in a more capital efficient way through strategic partnerships and acquisitions,” says Chambers, chief executive officer of PropertyMaps.com.

You can read the full release here:  http://bit.ly/neXat

Thanks to all of our customers, broker partners and agents – Jeff has a ton of experience and will undoubtedly apply the knowledge he gained from running the US products for vacation rental leader HomeAway.com.  He will take good care of you and we look forward to this business growing bigger, faster and stronger in the years ahead.

– The PropertyMaps.com Team

We are constantly looking at ways to improve the usability of our site. Today, we are excited to release a significant improvement to our search. The location search field now has an auto complete option. As you type a location name into the search field, a list containing locations we currently have properties for will automatically populate. In order to make it easier to find exactly what your looking for capitalization and punctuation is an issue of the past. We have also added a large amount of city aliases to help make it even easier to find your next home. In addition when a state has multiple cities with the same name the county name will be shown in parenthesis.

The Autocomplete feature also supports keyboard shortcuts. As you type and the list populates with suggestions simply arrowing up and down will move the current selection. Hitting return automatically submits the search and gets you on your way even faster!

If there is a location that you think we are missing please Contact Us and we will make every effort to add it.

Remember that if you don’t recall the name of area you can always “Browse for Properties” or look in our “Property Directory“.

Last week we quietly rolled out self-serve advertising on PropertyMaps. The new feature is tucked into a corner of the site during our beta phase, but once we work all the kinks out, we’ll start pushing this a little harder. Right now to access the self-serve ads, you will need to log in (create an account first if you don’t have one), then head on over to “My PropertyMaps“. You’ll see the new “Advertise on PropertyMaps” tab on the right (see pic below).

You can set up your ad to display in certain locations on the site and for certain zip codes. You can also decide how long you want your ad to run, how much you want to spend, and when your ad should start. We’ve made the entire sign-up process as automated as possible, but we still have to approve your ad before it goes into the rotation (we don’t really want to be peddling guns or porn).

We think this is a very powerful tool for advertisers as you can fine tune your ad for a micro location (or go big if you want to). If you have any feedback on this new system, leave a comment or post something in the Real Estate Forum.

Self-Serve Advertising

We’ve updated the front page with a simpler, more efficient design. This new design is meant to put more focus on the search and less on the other offerings we provide. There may be a few tweaks in the coming days, but we are deeply focused on simplifying the overall user interface. More announcements on that front coming soon so check back for updates.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

New PropertyMaps Front Page

You probably didn’t notice, but we’ve updated the property listing pages under the Property Directory and the Property Cloud areas. Rather than dumping a huge list of links you might go blind trying to decipher, we’ve made it a little friendlier with some spacing, images, and paging. This also prevents Google from destroying our server every time they crawl. Again, this isn’t a huge update, but the little things are what matter.

Property Listing Update

With the recent announcement of Yahoo jumping on OpenID, the number of accounts has almost tripled to 400 million users. Yahoo’s OpenID platform will be ready to go on 1/30 and we will support it from day 1. Google is also dabbling in the OpenID world and has recently became a provider with Blogger in Draft.

PropertyMaps now supports both the OpenID specification 1.1 and 2.0 as a consumer (not provider), meaning you can use almost any OpenID to simplify your PropertyMaps registration and sign in. This also means no more CAPTCHA and no more email validation to create an account. Go ahead an begin your OpenID registration.

If you don’t have an OpenID yet, or want to learn more about it, head on over to the OpenID website.

OpenID Sign In Now Available

We’ve partnered with RealtyTrac to bring you hundreds of thousands of foreclosure listings in all 50 states. Not only can you view authentic MLS property listings, you have access to foreclosure properties nationwide. On the foreclosure details pages, you can see the foreclosure status and a detailed explanation of what that status means, along with definitions of common foreclosure related terms.

For any of these properties, you can see full details, plus access a plethora of tools, by subscribing to RealtyTrac. They also offer a free 7-day trial so you can test out the system before you subscribe. For the amount of information/tools they offer, the benefits of membership far outweigh the costs. For more info on what you get, check out the member benefits.

Foreclosures Now Available!

Through our partnership with eppraisal.com, we have added a free property valuation tool to the website. For properties with valuation data, you will see a new section labeled “Comparative Market Analysis”. Unlike other sites out there, we provide a valuation range so you can see three distinct property values – low, medium, and high. This valuation tool is also provided as a link on each property summary (on the map page), so you can quickly access valuation info. We also provide a stand-alone “Free Home Appraisal” tool, allowing you to enter any address you like.

As stated in the press release, “eppraisal.com pulls together public record data from over 120 million homes to quickly and easily give you an estimated value range.” You can read more in our Free Home Value Data press release.

Property Details Comparative Market Analysis

The Location Information pages have been updated with area sports information. Now, by clicking on the “Sports Teams” tab, you can see high school, college, league, and professional sports teams and information. Also, we have a listing of stadiums in that state. All sports teams and stadiums have a link to their respective websites so you can get more information.

In addition, we added a submenu with links to the neighborhood’s population demographics, recent home sales, climate and weather, employment and finance, and crime statistics. Many people did not realize this data exists at the bottom of the page so we’ve made it easier to find.

Sports Information Page

We’ve upgraded the Global Village to the latest and greatest version of the underlying software. There are many, many new features to this upgrade including an entire private messaging system; updated control panels for users, moderators, and admins; attachment support; better search; and improved performance through caching.

During this upgrade, we discovered a bug in our previous forum implementation – passwords were not properly synching across PropertyMaps accounts and Global Village accounts. If you are having trouble logging in to the Global Village, do the following:

1. Sign in to PropertyMaps by clicking the “Sign in” link on the upper right of the page.
2. Go to “My Account”, accessible through the “My PropertyMaps” dropdown menu or the “My Account” tab if you are already in “My PropertyMaps”.
3. Update your password (you can keep your password the same).
4. That’s it. If you still encounter problems, please email support@propertymaps.com.

The New Global Village