Thursday, June 17, 2010

Google Maps now showing local properties for sale/to rent

Lego used to have the advertising strap line:

It’s a new toy everyday!

Today that seems to also apply to Google, who are continuously enhancing fully-released tools and releasing new beta tools for testing and evaluation. This is the company who reused their Google Maps implementation to create Google Moon!

While I’ve long been familiar with the idea of customer overlays allowing you to add pins on top of Google Maps, until yesterday I didn’t realise that there was a built-in facility to display properties for sale and to rent.

Snippet from Google Maps showing Northern Ireland properties for sale/to rent

Google Maps are aggregating property information from two local online property portals: Property Pal and Property News (backed by the Belfast Telegraph). You just need to hover over the More button and tick the Properties option to automatically see properties available in your area.

Strangely though, while my house in East Belfast is up for sale and listed on both portals, neither seem to be feeding it through to Google Maps. Umm .....

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