Suburb View now searching 100 web sites for Property Listings.

Today I have updated Suburb View Australia to search 100 Web sites for Property Listings. This is a great achievement for myself, as I created this web site to search for my first home. The sites I run now attract over 100,000 visitors a month, and allows visitors to view almost 1 Million property links.

History of Suburb View

In 2006 I started to look for my first home, at that time real estate listings were including a simple map that showed where the property was. But there was no way of looking at the map to find out where the other properties were for sale.

I began manually adding properties to the map with the goal of :

• Find as many property listings for an individual house for sale, as I was finding the same property listed at different prices
• Identify on the map what the nearby properties prices are listed at
• Visual way of seeing properties with different amount of bedrooms.
• Options to show and hide properties I wasn't interested in.

As I was manually doing this, I was lucky to put 20 properties on the map a night. As a software developer, I then wrote up some code to search from 3 web sites, and put the results into Google Earth. I then realised I wouldn't be the only person interested in this, and I registered this web site, and it went live in August 2006

It was a first in Australia to be using Google Earth, and to be mapping multiple properties on the map. At the time, most real estate web sites were saying 6 to 12 months before they would be using map in this way. Then in September 2006 Google Maps was updated to include Australia, and then shortly after that the real estate sites began to use the Maps to show multiple properties.

Suburb View was updated to now show property on the web site with the help of Google Maps, and still continued to use Google Earth. One of the advantages of Google Earth is it allows you to save the file. So you can keep a reference of the suburb you were interested in.

More sites created

After Suburb View had collected about a years worth of property listings, I created the web site http://www.oldlistings.com.au to make use of the data I was no longer using. This site is a great tool to identify the historical prices that properties have been advertised for. Also in these financial times, the site is also highlighting big price decreases across many suburbs.

With friends from New Zealand wanting the same thing as what Suburb View was doing, I then created http://www.suburbview.co.nz in my Easter break 2008

Getting sites listed on Suburb View

It is free for a real estate site to have their listings on Suburb View. If you are interested click here.

Suburb View Current and Future

Suburb View has been a great way for me to create a tool for other first home buyers, property investors, renters etc.

It has seen me get some exciting roles, like working for Lonely Planet on the digital maps for their site relaunch.
Also achievements : Suburb View makes BRW Top 100 Web 2.0 Applications

I am currently available for work, so if you have a position requiring somebody of my skill set, please feel free to contact me contact (a) suburbview.com

-Mark
Suburb View Network