Kris Berg and Jonathan Dalton have been making good use of ZeeMaps to show sales activity in their local market areas.
I’ve been digging this, but at StarPower, I discovered that I am smart and lazy — good at figuring out how to avoid hard work. So: I built a little bot that, in conjunction with our MLS system, will build ZeeMaps of ideas I want to illustrate visually. Here, for example, is MLS activity in the F.Q. Story Historic District of Phoenix for the month of July: Active, Pending, Expired and Cancelled. I have the bot set up to use different colors for Sold, Active With Contingencies and Temporarily Off Market, as well.
We’ll use this for DistinctivePhoenix.com, to show off the neighborhoods we farm, but we will be able to use it for any purpose we can imagine — listing appointments, price-adjustment meetings, etc. We can make a map out of any search we can run. It’s not a mapping search interface, but it’s something while we wait to get a mapping search interface.
Rodney Coty says:
Much better looking map than the current tax portion of the MLS sytem provides. Pretty cool!
August 7, 2007 — 4:58 pm
Chuchundra says:
You can do the same thing by working directly with Google Maps and bypassing the ZeeMaps middle man.
August 7, 2007 — 7:16 pm
Kris Berg says:
Congratulations! I love the mash-up and think you will agree, the possibilities are endless. On your map, I noticed you listed the addresses of active and pending homes. Our MLS prohibits this unless it is our listing or unless the listing broker is clearly identified subject to IDX rules. Different rules?
August 7, 2007 — 8:15 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Our MLS prohibits this unless it is our listing or unless the listing broker is clearly identified subject to IDX rules. Different rules?
You cannot calculate how much time I don’t spending thinking about rules. I think you’re probably right, so I’ll add the brokerage names.
August 7, 2007 — 9:06 pm
Todd Carpenter says:
>You cannot calculate how much time I don’t spending thinking about rules
LOL. I remember when Dustin Luther made a similar, but less elegant mash up well over two years ago. I asked him the same question and got about the same answer.
August 7, 2007 — 10:56 pm
Greg Swann says:
> I asked him the same question and got about the same answer.
I don’t even know what to do about it. The database feed I’m working from doesn’t give me the full brokerage name, just the MLS code. So BloodhoundRealty.com would show up as BHND01. I could write a lookup easily enough if I had a table of brokerages. I have a request into ARMLS for that. I know they have it, they have to have it. But will they share it…? Every second of the demise of the paleolithics who presume to run this industry will be an eternity.
August 7, 2007 — 11:13 pm
John L. Wake says:
I am in awe of that! Magic.
Say a buddy, Philip Rosenberg, emailed me tonight wanting Phoenix people to sign up for Realbird.
http://www.realbird.com/?refID=4590 (Scroll down and put in your zip code.)
They say if they get 30, they’ll add your MLS. We’ll see.
Their system is pretty clunky but it’s cheap.
August 9, 2007 — 12:29 am
Greg Swann says:
iHomeFinder is also butt ugly, but it’s available in ARMLS now. I didn’t know until I noodled around with the links from Russell’s post.
August 9, 2007 — 12:32 am