Google Street View Comes To Town
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
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PropertyMaps Enters The Mile High City
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
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
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
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
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
Major Map Improvement With The Addition of Parcel Boundaries
We’ve added parcel boundaries to our map based search so you can now see the exact lot size for any listed property. This is the most comprehensive boundary data set available anywhere, with over 500 counties and 80 million parcels. If your area isn’t covered yet, the parcel data is expected to grow to encompass 1000 counties and over 100 million parcels.
We have the top four zoom levels in satellite or hybrid mode covered, representing hundreds of millions of tiles. If you haven’t noticed, Google Maps has different zoom levels depending on what view mode you’re in. To get the most out of the parcel boundaries, it’s best to use satellite or hybrid view as this gives you the highest zoom capability.
Update: You can read more about this enhancement in the Parcel Boundary Press Release.
Parcel Boundaries Now Available
Dynamically populating ’select’ elements with javascript
new Option(text,value);
As referenced in many javascript sources including “The Book” is bad, and should not be used. new Option forces browsers to use an older DOM model (0 or 1) instead of the now modern level 2.
The DOM does not mix and match so doing:
selectBox.appendChild(new Option(text,value));
fails in IE.
The fix is to use the DOM1 level support which is the ‘add’ method on the select element.
selectBox.add(new Option(text,value));
Problem with this is the way the spec was written for the ‘add’ method. It takes 2 parameters.
- an option object.
- the index position you want to insert it into your select element.
The spec defines that the second parameter should be null instead of undefined in order to append to the end of the list. This means that in any browser that follow the spec the second parameter must be explicitly set. This is one rare example where I prefer IE’s implementation.
// in FF or W3C compliant browser selectBox.add(new Option(text,value),null);
Problem with this is IE does not understand the null and fails. so you have to wrap this in a try catch.
try {
selectBox.add(new Option(text,value),null);
} catch(ex){
selectBox.add(new Option(text,value));
}
The solution is to use all DOM2 commands and stay far away from ‘new Option’.
var option = document.createElement('option');
option.setAttribute('value','value');
option.appendChild(document.createTextNode('text'));
selectBox.appendChild(option);
it is also important to note that using the DOM2 creation of the ‘option’ element does not work with the ‘add’ method on the ’select’ method in any browsers.
Totally compatible mootools shorthand, and my current accepted solution:
selectBox.appendChild( new Element('option', {'value' : value }).appendText(text) );
PropertyMaps Expands Into Miami-Dade And Surrounding Areas
We’ve just added Miami-Dade and the surrounding areas for a total of over 60,000 new properties and 500,000 property images. We now have the Southeast Area of Florida covered. We are very excited to be working with one of the premier brokerages in Miami-Dade to cover this area: Terrabella Realty.
Miami-Dade County is the most populous county in Florida with a population of 2,402,208, according to the US Census Bureau. We’re extremely pleased to add such a huge region to our map as our national rollout continues. Shortly, we will begin publishing statistics about our property and image counts.
Update: You can read more about our partnership with Gustavo Blachman and Terrabella Realty in our Miami-Dade Properties Press Release.
PropertyMaps Adds Miami-Dade And Surrounding Areas
We’ve Moved
According to this press release, I guess we moved. I was too busy to notice until my 30″ Cinema Display arrived. Then I felt like there was more room. With a resolution of 2560 x 1600, I have more than 4 million pixels to work with.. In addition to my laptop that has a 1440 x 900 display and powers the entire rig, I have somewhere around 5.3 million pixels total. The good part is I have totally mobility, the bad part is I miss my 4 million extra pixels when I’m not in the office.
Oh, the new office. I think it is around 5,000 square feet and can hold maybe 30 people.
PropertyMaps Moves Into Larger Offices
