Using online mapping while trying to find a dream house

Using Online Mapping While Trying to Find a Dream House

February 7th, 2007 · 18 Comments · GIS, Google, Google Earth, Google Maps

I had a problem. I sold my house about a month ago (which is good in this market) but hadn’t found a place to buy. Taking the raw MLS results and using online mapping tools to see relationships between houses/schools/roads/airports/railroads/etc is harder than it should be.

First off I figured I’d just do it all in Google Earth and KML. This lasted about a day as Google’s (and Microsoft too) geocoding is less than desired in the area’s of Tempe I was looking at (at times hundreds of yards off). So I ended up using a couple of tools to research the locations before visiting on the ground (with 45,000 homes for sale in Maricopa County, you need to eliminate choices before visiting them).

First off the MLS site that my real estate agent uses is pretty good. ~~I’ve not been able to figure out the company that makes the site, but~~ Steve’s site runs on HomeQuest which is visually a cross between Mapquest and Google Maps. It has a quick AJAX interface that makes it easy to see the general location of a property and the neighborhood it is in (the neighborhood boundaries were very helpful).

The problem is you can’t tell what side of the road it is on and it doesn’t have aerial imagery. Putting the address into Google Maps gives you a nice overview of the house. The problem is that it makes it hard to share multiple locations (pasting 10 permalinks in an email is a non-starter). I tried to work with KML, but that was just an extra step I didn’t want. but it still doesn’t give you a feeling of the location of the house that you’d like before you spend an afternoon there only to see it is next to a Walmart. The work around for me was to use Zillow. Zillow has a much better address search and you can see the parcels to get a better understanding of the particular house.

Now the Zillow aerial is not as nice as Google’s, but they do have the Bird’s Eye view so I decided to click on that.

Sorry, we do not have images available for this location, but check out our Bird’s Eye View of Famous Homes.

OK so that doesn’t work. I know Microsoft Virtual Earth has Bird’s Eye View for Tempe, so off to another site. As I said above, Virtual Earth and Google are both off a little bit on the geocoding (not a big deal for directions, but important when looking at a house) so I used Zillow to pinpoint the house and pan the Bird’s Eye View.

So I can see the yard, the neighbors, the big road in the backyard, the railroad now the street and the power plant 1/4mile away (all without having to visit). The best part about Virtual Earth was that I could add multiple listings to my scratch pad and then share that with my wife, her mom (very important) and friends. KML would have been too much of a hassle and it doesn’t offer the Bird’s Eye View that is so valuable.

Now if Zillow had updated their Bird’s Eye since the first introduced it, I might have never bothered with Virtual Earth, but the Zillow/VE combo was just killer in finding the house I wanted in the location I wanted. I figured I’d be using Google Earth for this exercise, but Virtual Earth’s scratch pad is so valuable with sharing multiple points of interest that I never even bothered with Google’s products.

What about Realtor.com and ESRI’s ArcWeb interface? Well Realtor.com was very slow. Even getting to the map took WAY TOO MANY CLICKS and I’d just give up. The map was nice, but it too was stuck in that horrible slow interface. Compared the my realtor’s site and the Zillow/VE combo it was just too much of a pain to deal with.

So I found my house and I close end of March. The only problem is I have to live in an apartment for that time between February 14th (when I close on my current house) and March 28th when I close on the new house. I can’t wait for the fun that will be. At least that will give me time to fix Planet Geospatial (yea I’m a bad person for letting that fall apart) and build a 3D model of my new house in SketchUp.

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18 responses so far ↓

1 Mangocrate // Feb 8, 2007 at 4:18 am

James-

Check out ZipRealty (http://www.ziprealty.com) - they map out MLS on top of VE - they also have a hook into Zillow. Pretty nice.
2 Chad // Feb 8, 2007 at 5:47 am

But ZipRealty hardly coveres anywhere though.
3 Chaz // Feb 8, 2007 at 6:07 am

http://www.trulia.com is an intresting real estate site I have found.
4 James Fee // Feb 8, 2007 at 6:36 am

ZipRealty requires you to register before seeing the home listings. I didn’t want to do that.

I had forgotten about trulia and didn’t use it.
5 David E. Wright // Feb 8, 2007 at 9:18 am

As a side note.. wouldn’t it be cool to have a function like that scrap-pad in ArcIMS??? Hey waite.. you can.. and it is even thematic… I am not going to spam the blog but it is pretty cool!
6 Jack Dangermond // Feb 8, 2007 at 11:39 am

Why would you want to buy near the top of the market? You sold at near the top…good job! Now be smart and wait. Don’t let a realtor, or another real estate bull, coax you into believing the market has already bottomed out. Most ARMs haven’t reset and when they do everybody that overpaid and over extended themselves is going to be in a world of pain. Rent a nice house, save a ton of money, and when it does bottom out in ‘08 or so, pick up something for 50% of the price.

Go read this site for a lot of good articles on the current housing bubble. It’s definitely eye opening…
http://www.thehousingbubbleblog.com
7 Whitey // Feb 8, 2007 at 11:46 am

James-

I just went through the same process and I too found the MS Virtual Earth birds-eye view to be very useful, however I didn’t use zillow for geocoding, which looking back would have been the smart move. However, using VE I could compare the photo in the MLS listing and the birds-eye view and figure out the exact house.

Its a shame the realtor.com site is so useless, it really needs an upgrade to web 2.0. Additionally, my realtor mentioned that they don’t place their listings on realtor.com because they don’t think the cost is justified. They work in Redlands. If a realtor doesn’t think listing homes in Redlands on realtor.com is worth while, I don’t see how it would work anywhere.

Congrats on the the new home. Why do I suddenly have the theme to The Jeffersons in my head?
8 Whitey // Feb 8, 2007 at 12:08 pm

@JackD

I had that thought too, selling, renting, then buying when the prices bottomed out. However, the problem is, that like Mr Fee, I’m not just moving myself. I have a wife, two kids, a dog and two cats. Moving is not a small deal. So we would have to move out of our home to a rental home for an indetermined amount of time, then move again when we buy. Also possibly changing my kids schools more than one time. To go through double the hassle because some forcasters say that prices will drop? They may very well be right, but they could also be wrong.
9 James Fee // Feb 8, 2007 at 1:18 pm

Jack, I agree with Whitey. I don’t want to rent and I need the tax deduction anyway. Markets go up and they go down. I’m not planning on moving until Connor is out of High School (at least that is the plan) so I don’t really care what happens to the house in the next 5 years.

I found the perfect house in the neighborhood I wanted with the school I want my son in just down the street. The neighborhood I got in doesn’t turn over much (I’ve been watching it for years) so when a house comes on the market there that fits your needs, you jump on it.
10 Kyle G // Feb 8, 2007 at 1:51 pm

I did this recently too, only I bought before I sold. I used http://www.prukc.com/HomeSearch/ - and I even talked about it in a GIS presentation, and compared with other tools out there, it was my favorite.

Sold my home using Craigslist and Community Walk to highlight & market my house and neighborhood. According to the calls I got, craigslist referred more people to me than my $200 newspaper ad.

Check out my house - http://www.communitywalk.com/explore?placeSearchText=Lawrence%20,KS

It’s the second one, not the first one. But check out the first map - the Piss Off 2006. I used this link in my presentation too, and it was a huge hit amongst the GIS community in the KC metro area.
11 Doug // Feb 9, 2007 at 1:48 pm

I don’t think that Dimitri would approve of those housing prices. Long ago Dimitri moved Manifold’s software operation to sub saharan Africa.

@Jack: I don’t think that James wants to live in a dumpster and if you are buying as a long term investment then any minor market corrections are mostly irrelevant to you making a profit in 10 years when you sell to reselling. Find a house you love at a price you can afford, buy it and enjoy it.
12 dan stark // Feb 12, 2007 at 11:40 am

Wow - did you have a preview copy of the Sunday New York Times Real Estate section?!! I’ve been looking for a house since the beginning of the year using all the online tools that I can find. I hadn’t seen trulia before I read about it here last week then the articles in the Times yesterday. Your blog post and the articles makes it feel like everybody is doing the same thing at the same time!
13 Brian Parr // Feb 13, 2007 at 3:42 pm

I just went through a similar process in which I used all sorts of GIS tools, data, websites, and knowledge to find a house.

In the end, however, it all came down to driving the streets, walking through neighborhoods, and talking to locals.

Go figure.
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