PropertyMaps Corporate Blog

24,000+ more properties added to the Charlotte area of North Carolina. Charlotte is the largest city in the state, so we are very pleased to enter this market. This puts at over 36,000 properties for NC. We have more areas for this state in the pipeline so if we haven’t covered your area yet, please be patient as it is coming real soon now.

PropertyMaps Expands in North Carolina
with the Addition of Charlotte

We are quietly announcing a new feature - “The Property Cloud”. This provides yet another way for our users to browse for real estate in our ever growing database. On the top navigation bar, click on “Property Cloud” to see it in action. I know, this is/was the hottest fad in “web 2.0″ companies when tagging was all the rage, but in this context, it really does provide a valuable service. I hope everyone out there likes this feature as much as I do. For those not in the know, the font size of an area is weighted based on the number of properties within that area. Mouse over an area to see the total property count.

The Property Cloud

We’ve added a couple minor features to the site in the last week that you may not have noticed. Here is a rundown:

1. Global Village (top/center) - We have rebranded our “Ask an Expert Forum” to “Global Village” to give it more appealing, intimate feel.
2. Developer Area (bottom/left) - A new area dedicated to webmasters, developers, and fellow brokers. Big plans are in store for this section, but for now we have a selection of PropertyMaps links and banners.
3. Real-time Counter (bottom/right) - A widget from whos.amung.us that displays the number of current users on the site. The lower picture shows there were 13 concurrent users (at the time of the screenshot), mostly from the US, but throughout the day we had traffic from around the world.

Minor Features Added

Who’s Among Us?

32,000+ parties (err, properties) were added to the Fort Lauderdale area. I’ll have to go check out some of the listings come spring break. This addition catapults Florida to the top of the chart with the most properties. Currently we have almost 150,000 listing in Florida alone. Now on to the other states…

Going on Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale

The first of several areas of Arizona has gone on the map. We added Tucson, with 10,000 or so properties for the area. More regions of Arizona will be online in the next couple weeks. You might also see that we have a few stragglers in other states such as Utah, New Mexico, and Montana. We haven’t officially entered these markets yet, there was just some spillover from the surrounding states. We do have plans for those areas though.

PropertyMaps Enters Arizona

Rounding out our coverage of the San Francisco area, we’ve put East Bay on the map with 17,000 properties. I have many fond memories of hanging out in Oakland with friends attending UC Berkeley. Berkeley was also were I got to experience Virtual Reality for the first time when it was the cool thing in the 90’s, but the pizza in the area was more exciting. More updates on California are on the way.

PropertyMaps Adds East Bay, San Francisco

Our coverage of Florida’s Gulf Coast is filling out nicely with the addition of Englewood. This gives us another 2,500 properties on this coast. We’ll shortly have greater coverage of the Space Coast and will add Miami as well. So far Florida and Texas are neck and neck in the race for most properties per state. California is probably going to pull ahead of the pack in the next couple weeks, more details later.

PropertyMaps Expands Gulf Coast to Include Englewood

We’ve made it to Las Vegas, adding over 30,000 properties to this area. For those keeping track, Las Vegas means “The Meadows” in Spanish. According to the Census Bureau, Las Vegas (Northern City), was the fastest growing city in the country with an almost 12% growth rate in 2007. We couldn’t be happier to be in this market. I’m going to have to make a trip out there to make sure pushpin placement on the strip is accurate (and bet on 26 black).

PropertyMaps Adds Las Vegas

On Monday, we had the Tampa Channel 8 news crew visit our office to film a piece on PropertyMaps.com. The segment was initially broadcast last night and will again be broadcast today and this weekend. The main angle of the story was the amount of information we provide to home searchers - sex offenders, schools, businesses, and neighborhood demographics. From the story, we had an overwhelmingly positive response to the display of the offender data on the website. Many applauded our efforts and encouraged us to not let the naysayers thwart our efforts. You can see the clip in the below YouTube video.

Update: Check out the Houston press release.

We’re in Houston now, the largest city in Texas, with over 50,000 properties in the area. This pushes our total for the state of Texas beyond 100,000 real estate listings and we still have several major cities to roll out. Next week we will add two major cities (elsewhere in the US). Hint: one can be translated as “The Meadows”, the other is the birthplace of the Apple Pascal programming language.

PropertyMaps Adds Houston