Suffering a Google Death...

Posted July 6th, 2009 by Mark
in

Is suburbview.com going to suffer a Google Death?

Today has seen the release of Google Real Estate, Australia http://maps.google.com.au/realestate , New Zealand http://maps.google.co.nz/realestate .
Now is Suburb View going to head into the internet graveyard? Well lets see what will happen, I am more than happy to document any decrease in traffic, so be sure to watch the updates to this blog.

Suburb View History :

Created in 2006 as a need to view property on the Map, I wrote some code to search a small handful of websites and provide a downloaded KML file to show the properties in Google Earth. Shortly after the release of the web site, the Google maps API was available to Australia, and I quickly updated the web site to show both properties on the map, Google Earth, RSS feeds and on the mobile phone.

By searching multiple web sites, and linking back to all the original locations of the property, it allowed me to see any advertised price differences if a property was listed with different agents.

I have always kept the data available and saw the creation of http://www.oldlistings.com.au that showed a history of all advertised property details picked up by Suburb View. This gave the visitor the knowledge when the property was re-listed on the market. It's also a great tool for rental prices. This year saw me introduce the property reports which graph the data I have listed from both Suburb View & Old Listings.

One of the advantages of Suburb View as it is not a portal site, it has its own search engine and is linking directly to the found property. This included the Agents listing, For Sale by Owner (FSBO) and a variety or Property portals. This would mean some properties could have over 5 links. That way you would be able to see the full advertised details including virtual tours, video, and any other property advertising.

How Google Real Estate is working

When you search via the google home page : eg google.co.nz

Then enter a property address what is now happening is the first thing that appears is a big picture on the map. Which could be considered as a large banner for google Maps.

Once you click on the map link you are shown the property on the map, and now there is a link to view 'All real estate near this address' which will direct you to the google real estate site with all the properties.

One of the great things the Google Maps site does is gets around the browser limitation of too many markers by using an image overlay. example

I would be interested to see how Google treats a Portal real estate listings vs the actual Agents listings. Time will tell on this one, as I do think an Agents listings should have the highest priority. Because if I was searching for a property on Google I would like to be directed to the Real Estate Agent who is selling the property.

Suburb View Example

There are still a lot of extra things especially visually that Suburb View uses on the map that helps looking for property. This includes easily identified Bedroom numbers, prices displayed on Property Markers, and Colours used to display the different types of property. Large Street view shown under the map that is updated when you select a property. There are options to display and save the property listings in Google Earth, and use RSS feeds to get property updates. Also there are Property Reports, and Old Property Data.

Current Stats - 6th July 2009


Currently Suburb View (Australia) searches 118 Web sites
Links to 989,792 Property Listings For Sale
Links to 244,060 Property Listings For Rent.
Traffic for June 2009 : 82,635 Unique Visitors

Last Weeks Traffic (Sun 28th June -> Sat 4th July)
18,929 Visitors

Its bad enough Bing.com shows Suburbview.com no love.

Be sure to ReTweet this, and check back for updates, which I will be doing every week.


-Mark