John Musser, February 18th, 2007 Comments(6)

It’s hard to find an online real estate site today that does not in some way incorporate maps. And so it’s no surprise that another of the top ten tags at ProgrammableWeb is “realestate”, now with 78 mashups tagged realestate. Keep in mind that the first, and still one of the best all-time mashups, is Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps that combines the Google Maps API and Craigslist.com listings.

One consideration is that just being a real estate mashup does not mean it’s only a re-hash of a listing database. Take Rentometer, a genuinely useful mashup that can help you determine if you are paying too much in rent. Enter an address, apartment size, and rent. It maps nearby units and shows a meter of your price versus min, max and average.

And then there’s the fact that it’s an international phenomenon:

Maiom Italy Real Estate: A sophisticated Italian real estate application using Google Maps with live completion geocoding, google earth integration, starrable posts, RSS feeds, lightboxed images, and YouTube videos.
NZFlats: NZFlats.co.nz uses the Zoomin API to Mashup rental New Zealand property listings on the Zoomin mapping system.
Vivirama: A housing listings website for all cities of the world. It uses Google Maps to facilitate locating the offers, and RapLeaf API to help to create the required trust for transactions to occur. It lets you search graphically by area and across cities.
Spyk Australian Property Search: A rich, dynamic mashup of Australian real estate websites onto the virtual earth map. Users can store favourites, and view full property details using lightboxes.
SeLoger: French real estate prices. Charts, maps, median prices. Time line of prices over time. Housing data from France.

Nor is it all Google Maps, many of the other mapping APIs get used:

NY vs SF Census Heat Map: Compare demographic information analyzing property values, population, education, income level and more with integrated Yahoo Local search points. Data Limited to NY and SF. Uses the new GeoIQ API.
AuctionCloud: A different way to shop the eBay listings for the most searched for products being auctioned. AuctionCloud shows popular keywords used by eBay users when searching listings. Real estate section uses the Zillow API for zestimates.
HomeThinking: Homethinking, built using the Yahoo! Maps API, monitors real estate transactions to know what each agent has done and also customer reviews about the job they did.

Lastly, just because it’s real estate, doesn’t mean it has to be boring. The ever inventive Jeff Marshal gives us the RealEstateFu mashup, a great mashup that “lets you watch the housing bubble deflate in SF and Silicon Valley.” Charts, map, median prices. Timeline of prices over time. Housing data from SF Gate.