PropertyMaps Corporate Blog

Take That, Bernanke!

Chris Latko — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:39:21 +0000

There are many conflicting views of how Mr. Bernanke should have handled the Fed after the departure of the true overlord, Alan Greenspan. Reducing interest rates to soften the landing of the real estate crash - did he go overboard? was it enough? I’ll leave the debate to the armchair economists, but I do know that the whole industry is going through a huge transition due to the power of the intertubes and the desire of information to be free.

Our friends at RentBits.com created this montage of Ben Bernanke using Real Estate Web 2.0 logos. We’re honored to be included and to be a part in making the RE2.0 transition happen.

RE2.0 Montage Of Bernanke
(photo courtesy RentBits.com)

PropertyMaps Featured In Southwest Florida Herald-Tribune

Chris Latko — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 15:49:50 +0000

Monday’s Southwest Florida Herald-Tribune brought with it a multi-page spread on PropertyMaps, including front page, above the fold treatment. You can head over to the Herald-Tribune’s website to read the PropertyMaps feature. We want to thank Tom Bayles for the all the time he spent in making this article happen. He was a pleasure to work with.

PropertyMaps Spread In Herald-Tribune

Database Optimizations

Chris Latko — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:17:55 +0000

Oh, around the end of April, we made some enhancements to our DB structure and our queries. This round of changes focused on the JOINS and UNIONS and COUNTS and some others, giving us a nice speed boast in our benchmarks. We thought not much of it and went on to other things. Logging in to Google Webmaster Central gave me quite a shock when I saw the chart for time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds). We’ve gone from an average of about 4,300 milliseconds to less than 400, an order of magnitude difference!

We have another trick up our sleeve, but need to do an intense code review and QA before pushing it out to production. This other trick is a tad more complicated, but watching the site run on the dev server is amazing. Hopefully, we can wrap that optimization up and get it live shortly. I’ll probably blog about it when we do.

Go Servers, Go

Property Directory / Property Cloud Updated

Chris Latko — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:16:30 +0000

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

Google Street View Comes To Town

Chris Latko — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 21:25:00 +0000

Google has added 37 (Thirty-Seven!) new cities to Street View, including our local area of Sarasota. We added Google Street View to our property details pages in April so we are very excited to see the number of cities almost double since then. This functionality is especially useful as it allows you to not only see the location of the property, but it lets you stroll around the neighborhood. You can also read more about our implementation in our Google Street View Press Release.

For a full list of new cities covered, take a look at Google’s blog post.

Google Street View Comes to Sarasota

PropertyMaps Enters The Mile High City

nwhite — Mon, 05 May 2008 20:00:00 +0000

We finally entered into Colorado’s Capital of Denver and the surrounding locations adding over 26,000 new listings. According to the Rocky Mountain News, while the national population is growing at just under 1 percent a year, Colorado’s rate is 1.4 percent and is forecasted to be 1.8 percent in the near future. Apparently that’s a rate more typical of developing countries than of most Western democracies. Colorado also boasts having 3 of the 5 counties nationally that doubled their population between 1960-2000.

As one of the most isolated major cities in the United States, Denver always has been obsessed with transportation systems. Fear of being bypassed began early when railroads and later, airlines, originally avoided Denver because of the 14,000-foot-high Rocky Mountain barrier just west of town. To secure Denver’s place on national transportation maps, the city opened a new $5 billion airport in 1995. The 55-square-mile Denver International Airport is the nation’s largest in terms of area and capacity for growth, prompting advocates to call it the world’s largest.

We are excited to add the Denver area to our maps, helping to make this beautiful city just a little less isolated from the rest of the nation.

Update: You can read more about our partnership with Jeff Fogler of Signature Brokers in our Denver, Colorado Press Release.

PropertyMaps Enters Colorado

We’ve Got Images

Chris Latko — Sun, 04 May 2008 16:38:19 +0000

We’ve already started talking about our property counts in various press releases (1.3 million), but have never touched on the subject of how many images we have for those properties. As of this writing, we have over 8.5 million unique images. I think this is pretty significant as this is one of the most important criteria for real estate searches on the Internet. According to the National Association of Realtors®:

A study by REALTOR.com found that a home listing with six photos got 300 percent more views than a property with one or no photos, says REALTOR.com President and CEO Allan Dalton.

On average, we have at least 6 images per listing on ProperyMaps.com and these images are updated daily. No wonder we fried the processor/motherboard on one of our servers last week.

Over 8.5 Million Unique Images

We’re In The Top 100

Chris Latko — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:16:21 +0000

Somehow we’ve managed to get into the Top 100 Real Estate Blogs and this isn’t the only site to rank us in the top 100.

This is quite an accomplishment and we feel honored to be ranked this highly. We will continue to do our best to bring you real estate news, PropertyMaps updates, and of course geek content.

Congratulations to PropertyMaps bloggers and keep up the good work!

Google Street View Added To Property Details Pages

Chris Latko — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 18:30:04 +0000

For areas that Google has Street View available, you will now see a new tab across the top of the property details pages called “Street View”. Clicking this, you’ll get a split screen map with the property marker / little man icon in hybrid view on top and the Street View panorama on bottom.

You can click the arrows within the panorama to move along streets or grab and drag to change your perspective (the little man will also update on the top map to indicate your movement). You can also pick up the little man and drop him on any blue highlighted street, allowing you to easily move around the neighborhood. The screenshot below shows a nice condo on Paradise Road in Las Vegas.

There are currently around 40 major cities where Street View is available, you can learn more about it on the Google Street View page.

Update: You can read more about this addition in the Google Street View Press Release.

Google Street View of MLS Property

PropertyMaps Invades Georgia

Chris Latko — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 04:21:02 +0000

We’ve finally entered Georgia in a big way, with around 83,000 properties and another half-million images. Georgia has 18 of the 100 fastest growing counties in the country and is the third fastest growing state in terms of population numbers overall, so we’re very excited about adding this area.

We’ve also made some massive improvements to our geocoder that allowed us to reduce our overall failure rate three-fold. This is probably a topic for another post so I’ll leave it alone for now.

Update: You can read more about this addition in the Affiliation with Atlanta Broker David Nix Press Release.

PropertyMaps Enters Georgia