Chad Fisher enjoys life as an entrepreneur, developing sites to help people find
affordable housing, and creating a resource for users to compare auto insurance quotes from companies in their state.

An Android smart phone can be a real estate agent’s best friend. Rather than having to trudge back to the office or make a phone call when an impromptu inquiry pops up, you can have all the information you need in a jiffy. Real estate agents fulfill so many roles that you probably need more than just five good apps to get the job done. Still, these five apps are useful to any agent. They are available directly on your phone and can provide the information you need in just a few clicks.

1. Suburb Scout

This handy app highlights anything that might affect the property value of a home. It will show you at a glance how far away the nearest airport is, if there is a landfill in the area, or the proximity of the local power plants. Prisons in the area are also highlighted. REALTORS® and home shoppers can use this tool to eliminate any unexpected surprises before they get too far into the home buying process.

2. Smarter Agent

This clean-cut, easy-to-navigate app helps anyone locate the nearest homes or apartments for rent or sale. You can look up the prices for any listed property, as well as recent photos and maps of the location. You can also get a quick average of home values in the neighborhood by researching the prices that area homes have sold for within the last three years. Users can browse by price or location and narrow searches easily. Even REALTOR Magazine likes this app as a tool to share with clients. It’s a freebee you can offer that lets clients search the MLS based on GPS coordinates and other criteria.

3. Google Voice

Google Voice is quickly becoming one of the most useful tools for real estate agents. Once you establish your own Google phone number you can use the native Android app to send voice messages as well as text messages. You can also listen to voicemails or read text transcripts of the voicemails directly from Google. Since it is part of the Google suite of applications, it automatically incorporates all of your contacts and information in one place on your phone. It’s never been easier to stay in contact with prospects, the office and other agents.

4. Google Maps

Google Maps continues to improve its excellent interface. You can follow a GPS signal to make sure you are headed in the right direction, no matter what part of town you need to locate. You can use the app to locate businesses or schools in the area. It will calculate the distance between locations and give you a good estimate of how much time it will take to travel that distance. If you like, you can choose to get driving directions in a simple list form. You can also receive driving directions in a graphical interface that shows exactly where each turn is along the route.

5. Karl’s Mortgage Calculator

Nothing works better than a visual aid when trying to help prospective buyers understand the value of a home and the cost of a mortgage. Karl’s Mortgage Calculator helps you fulfill your role as adviser when buyers are considering a purchase. It offers a sophisticated visual analysis of loans and investments to help buyers feel confident about their purchases. Try different interest rates, early payoffs or extra payments for “what if” scenarios.

Other helpful apps that you might consider include Remember the Milk for a to-do list, iHandy Carpenter to get that last-minute wall hanging up straight, Evernote for capturing and organizing any type of information you need, Dropbox for storing and sharing documents in the cloud, and Safe Neighborhood to help clients with concerns about locating convicted offenders in the area.

What are your favorite Android apps?

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Seth Siegler is the cofounder of Simplistate, an eco-friendly, virtual real estate brokerage. He is also the owner and founder of Robot Workshop – a real estate technology solutions company specializing in IDX and PPC based lead generation. You can find his real estate industry blog at www.sethsiegler.com. We are also pleased to announce that Seth will be speaking at Real Estate Connect NYC 2011 in January!

The year was  2005.  Kanye West was singing about a Gold Digger and Google had just released its first Maps API and the real estate world was abuzz.  The word “mashup” was everywhere.  Everyone started building map-based IDX searches.

They started out as an optional way of searching and eventually became the norm.  Maps of all sizes anchored the search pages of real estate websites, worldwide.  Little markers of all shapes and sizes covered those maps, representing potential dream homes.

Fast forward five years…

Map based searches are pretty much the norm.

But I believe that they are holding us back in terms of usefulness to shoppers and lead capture.  I’m pronouncing map-based searches to be officially among the walking dead.  Here’s why…

Problem #1 – Only so many markers can be placed on a map

As a general rule of thumb, Google maps become unstable after 100 markers are placed.  Bing is about the same.  Even if Google and Bing were to increase their ability to handle more markers, the main problem would remain; only so many pushpins can fit on a map!  Users run into problems trying to select the listing they want on the map and end up accidentally selecting others.

So if you’re limited to displaying 100 or less markers on a map, you’re left with three options:

1. Make a marker represent an arbitrary number of listings, which can be confusing and misleading.
2. Only map some of the listings. This is also confusing and misleading.
3. Limit the number of results to 100 and ask users to either narrow their search or zoom in further until results are 100 or fewer.  This sounds decent in theory but, in reality, is confusing and frustrating to users.

This problem is severely exacerbated by an over-populated listing inventory.  This makes search queries resulting in less than 100 listings, few and far between.

Analytical users want the ability to see ALL matching listings.  No matter how many there are.  100 just won’t do.

Problem #2 – If the user doesn’t know the area, results on a map mean nothing.

Besides looking for a specific type of frontage, viewing results on a map tells shoppers who are new to your area, absolutely nothing.  It doesn’t say anything about streetscapes, neighborhood quality, architecture style or anything else they need to know.

Of course details are available when users click through from the main map interface to some sort of listing detail page, but that is backwards from what users really need.  They need that info BEFORE they view the listing on a map.

Crux of it

The main problem is that, a home’s location on a map is something that users don’t care about until they find out other more important info about the home.  If the home isn’t right for the buyer, they don’t care about its position on a confusing and crowded map.

What’s Next?

So if the map-search is officially dead, what should we replace it with?  Let me start by saying that this is something I think about every day.  I own a company called Robot Workshop that makes IDX solutions for agents and brokerages.  We’re currently putting the final touches on a new, non-map based interface…

In a way, I believe that we’ve come full circle.  Before map APIs, search results were presented in list form.  I believe we’re heading that way again but the main focus will be on the search criteria and input methods.

We’ve seen what Coldwell Banker has done with its BlueScape search. That’s a cool step in the right direction but too abstract for prime time.

Lifestyle search was a hot buzz term last year but nobody has really run with that concept yet.  (I do, however, believe there is a big future in lifestyle search.)

Ultimately, I think that we’ll need to get to a point where people can answer questions and listings will be suggested to them.  (Sort of like what real estate agents used to do before IDX searches…)

What do you think the search interfaces of the future should look like?

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In my post New Firefox Brings Location to the Browser, I asked the following question around the new browser’s location awareness capability.

So the race is on – which will be the first site to implement this feature? Any bets?

Well today, we have a winner. That was fast.

The blue circle has come to your desktop with Google Maps. If you’ve use the Maps app on your iPhone you’ll know what I’m talking about.

When you visit Google Maps with a supported web browser, you’ll see a new My Location button in the top left corner of the map. Simply click the button to center the map to your approximate location. If your location can be determined accurately enough, it’s shown with a blue circle, just like on Google Maps for Mobile. Click the button again to remove the blue circle, or to re-center the map after you’ve moved it away.

Combine this feature with the new embedded real estate searches in Maps (see Google Gets Serious about Real Estate Search) and you’re starting to see the foundation of a really slick application.

Something that might live in the new Google Chrome OS perhaps?

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John L. Scott’s Neighborhood Wizard was just the latest by a web site to clean up map based real estate search (see The Evolution of Map Based Searches). And while I called it a ‘gimmick’ in my earlier post, it is an important step forward towards making map searches more usable.

Point2 Homes has released a new release of their site recently that adds a similar feature by layering on a search box over a Google Map. This is a pretty significant release for Point2 that really brings their map search functions up to par.

First impressions – the overall design of the site is pretty utilitarian and the house icons were a little too cartoony for my taste. It also doesn’t work in Safari. But these are merely quibbles, functionally the site hits a home run.

Switching between the move icon and the drawing icon is slick. Drawing a search box around the area in which you are interested and then refining it as it zooms in, has always felt to me to be the most natural way to start a search. John L. Scott’s “Etch a Sketch” is perhaps a little more refined, but Point2’s implementation just feels easier to use.

Once you’ve defined the area you’re looking in, the Point2Homes map makes good use of AJAX to dynamically load the listings in the right sidebar, as you click on each. You can switch between the listing description and the search filter quickly and search results are reloaded dynamically as you refine your search. I liked this alot, it works very smoothly.

For each listing, you get a thumbnail image and a basic run down of property features (beds, baths etc.) – though if you want more information on a listing, Point2Homes takes you to off to a separate page. One feature I really like was how it knew the name of which neighborhood you we’re searching in (sometimes I didn’t know the name) and offers to show you more listings as well.

Ultimately, the biggest drawback is simply the lack of listings – Point2Homes pulls its listings from individual agents in its system rather than an MLS
feed or broker feed. For that reason, I can’t see Point2Homes ever being a mainstream real estate search page.

It’s too bad really, their innovations will probably go largely unused. What I’d really love to see is some sort of map search Frankenstein, that culls the best features from Point2 and Trulia, maybe throw Shackprices and Redfin into the mix too.

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Google recently called on me to give a quote for a case study they were writing on their Maps API (see New Blog to Keep an Eye On) and the case study is now live at Google Code. I’m a little bummed they didn’t give me a hyperlink but oh well, what can you do?

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Interested in the “geoweb” or where maps meet the Internet? Google LatLong is a new blog from the Google Earth and Maps team that you may want to bookmark.

As far as I’m concerned, Google releasing its Maps API was the flashpoint that sparked the Real Estate 2.0 revolution – so I’ll keep an eye on what they might be saying over there.

By the way, Google seemed to like that line… they used my quote in recent case study. (Click here to download and see the page, if you’re interested)

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With Shackprices.com getting a nice nod from Inman yesterday (now behind subscription paywall, unfortunately), I thought it appropriate to look at a couple of new real estate search mashups that have come across my inbox recently.

For real estate professionals or brokers looking to add a complete IDX map search to their web site, dsSearchAgent is a new product by Diverse Solutions, that can easily be white-labeled and customized for any existing website.

On first impression, dsSearchAgent has a nice simple design. It uses a tabs and sliders approach to refining search criteria that reminded me a lot of Shackyack and Blueroof.com. For me it feels like a much more intuitive way to search, as opposed to the approach taken by its closest competitor RealBird.com, which still relies on clunky drop down menus.

dsSearchAgent has a couple of nice eye-candy features too, like the slick use of Ajax-like refreshing to switch between the slider and text boxes. Map results are displayed on a generic Google Map.

Clicking on a pin take you to the details page, which incorporates a Flash slide show, an aerial map, mortgage calculator and Zillow Zestimate of the property’s value. Lots of valuable information that’s cleanly presented for a prospective buyer.

Clicking back on the Map tab it wasn’t immediately clear which pin I had clicked on or which property was highlighted. I found this a little confusing and could be solved with a simple color change on the pins. Furthermore, I found the info contained in the mouseover on the map pins a little lacking, I guess I’ve grown accustomed to seeing a small thumbnail image on each (too much time on Trulia I suspect).

While dsSearchAgent lacks the immediate visual impact of the Blueroof site and is missing the brilliant way Shackprices adds complementary information to a home search, I still think it is worthy of a closer look.

Realty Roundup, on the other hand, is a property management company that serves Sacramento County. They’ve developed a proprietary search tool called HouseHunter2.0 which I really like a lot.

What I found exciting about this site is that it truly puts the individual at the center of the search process. Moving the map marker around the map tells the site where to start the search. Using a radius search highlighted in purple, HouseHunter displays the results closest to you (up to 20 miles away).

It’s a little kludgey to get yourself started (I think I would have preferred a way to punch in your starting address and then start moving the marker around) but it was definitely a fun way to feel like you’re almost physically involved in the search process. I think it’s a function some of the other real estate search sites might be wise to emulate, at least as a secondary or alternative search method.

Check ‘em both out. I’d love to hear what you think.

P.S. BloodhoundBlog has a brief summary of the Inman News piece.

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Zillow’s got ‘em. So does Trulia. Crazy Egg will even map your web site activity with them. Basically, any data set can be made visually sexier with a heatmap.

That said, the GeoIQ API renders some of the best looking heat maps that I’ve seen so far. Check out their API Example.

I suspect we’ll be seeing more and more heat map implementations come to market very soon; housing prices, rental prices, cost of living, census data, weather trends, financial data – all can be displayed via a heat map. Consolidating this complex information into a visual representation highlights subtle patterns and illustrates trends very effectively.

Plus it just looks cool (or hot).

[via digg]

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Poynter Online reports from New Jersey on Montclair-based site Baristanet’s attempts to track the changes in their neighborhood through a Google Maps mashup. [via Lost Remote]

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