March 25th, 2010

Listings Web Service Pre-Wired for Touchscreen Search

By Scott Petronis, Senior Director of Product Management

Joel Burslem at 1000watt had a great post yesterday about the potential for application developers in using Apple iPad. Multi-touch technology, as Joel says, will bring back simplicity in search.

Case in point: Yahoo’s new Sketch-a-Search application. A user can draw on the map to “lasso” results and confine their search for places of interest to specific regions.

Finding lunch near our office is now as easy as creating a fingerprint.

The adaptation of touchscreen and multi-touch services for real estate search will depend on the flexibility of the content it is attached to.

It’s worth mentioning that our Listings Web Service is equipped with the capabilities to take advantage of rich search experiences quickly.

Onboard’s Listings Web Service allows you to send in a polygon and retrieve all the listings within that polygon, whether it was drawn in a computer browser or on a touchscreen.

In addition, applications built with widely available services like Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search, Google Maps or Bing Maps can be easily integrated with our web service to deliver a cutting-edge search experience. The developer simply needs to capture the polygon created in that app and send it to our service.

These advances in mapping applications will continue to help reduce development time and effort. Keep in mind, most of these devices also have GPS capabilities so a latitude/longitude point can be quickly determined so the user doesn’t have to input anything. Of course, the Onboard Listings Web Service also accepts a point and radius to conduct a search. For more accurate results, the service also approximates drive times and walk times so people can search for listings within a 20 minute walk from where they’re standing, for example.

Tags: 1000watt, Listings Web Service, mobile, mobile real estate, neighborhood search, search polygons, Yahoo Sketch-a-Search.

January 29th, 2010

Real Estate Webmasters Introduces REW IDX 3.0

By Jackie Berg, Marketing Specialist

We often get questions from individual agents looking to utilize our products to differentiate their websites in their respective marketplaces. Since our traditional solutions aren’t designed for individual agents, we decided to fill this need by launching our Value Added Reseller program to give agents the benefit of our content in various flavors. We package our neighborhood and home information for web developers who use their design and programming expertise to mold the data into innovative implementations that enhance user experience.

Real Estate Webmasters is a partner that does just that. REW takes our data and adds design, programming, and SEO expertise to deliver customized, cutting edge real estate websites. They allow their agents to sell based on clients’ lifestyle needs as well as extremely high-quality listing content (from both informational and visual standpoints). The neighborhood plugins REW mixes in to their offerings allows agents to display the same leading content used by the nation’s top brokerages.

The latest buzz at REW and in the agent community is about the new REW IDX 3.0 product. (See a live demo here.) This iFrameable IDX solution works with any website. It includes full lead management and IDX builder technology for customization.

REW IDX 3.0 is in beta and there are still a few more days to be a part of the testing group. Anyone (on an REW-approved MLS board) who signs up in January will have access to the product for 3 months. Those who are part of this group will save on a setup fee (normally $499) and will only have to pay for monthly features.

Real Estate Webmasters' new IDX solution allows users to draw their own neighborhood boundaries during home search.

Morgan Carey’s REW blog walks you through features to pay attention to. Here are a couple of the things that make 3.0 unique in this space:

• Polygonal parameter searches: so the user can draw their own ideal neighborhood
• Spherical/dragable radius searches
• Custom IDX search builder
• Schools and amenities overlay
• Streetview
• New map search results pagination

The REW team believes that agents are experts in his or her markets, thus giving them back-end controls to customize their display.

You can see the full integration of Onboard’s content in the map-based amenities data as well as the “get local” tab for detailed listings.)

For any agents out there who are looking to be a part of this testing group, click here to get in before the month ends.

Tags: agent websites, IDX search, IDX solutions, neighborhood search, Real Estate Webmasters, real estate websites, search polygons.