PropertyMaps Corporate Blog

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

We’ve added several thousand more properties to our Illinois real estate portfolio by expanding into the southern part of the state. We have more activity planned for Illinois and surrounding states so stay tuned…

PropertyMaps Expands into Southern Illinois

We’ve set up a new developers section where you can grab a PropertyMaps banner. We have a ton of great banners to choose from so if you find PropertyMaps useful, show some love and put a banner on your site.

One of Our Many Banners

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