Once again we see the big guys being compared in a race to have the best and fastest products. Mapping is the product at the heart of this debate and Redfin, the Seattle based real estate site, as taken a stand against MS’s Virtual Earth maps and changed to Google’s offering.

In a post on the Redfin Corporate Blog, the company has named “speed, speed, speed [as the issue] that convinced us to switch. In our worst case scenario of 500 pushpins on the map in IE6, GMaps is 385% faster.” If their calculations are correct, there’s little to argue with there.

Maps are a fantastic tool and addition to any real estate related site but only if they work efficiently. If they don’t, they’re more of a frustration and hindrance than if they weren’t there at all. In an industry that’s all about location, the ability to view where a property is located in relation to other properties, transport, schools, highways, beaches etc is essential. For the user, it cuts out the guess work and for agents it reduces the number of questions asked and probably delivers better quality leads.

So which tools are the other property sites using? Here’s a number of top US sites as rated by Hitwise, plus some top sites from other parts of the world:

1. Realtor.com (Virtual Earth)
2. Yahoo! Real Estate (Yahoo Maps)
3. Zillow.com (Virtual Earth)
4. ZipRealty (Virtual Earth)
5. Rent.com (Mapquest)
6. RE/MAX (Google Maps – Beta site also)
7. Homegain (Google Maps – through partnership with Homescape.com)
8. RealtyTrac (Virtual Earth)
9. Trulia.com (Google Maps)
10. REA Group sites (Google Maps)
11.Rightmove (Virtual Earth)
12. Immobilien Scout (Virtual Earth)
13. Seloger (Google Maps)
14. Globrix (Google Maps)

So it seems that it is a reasonably even race on the large portal sites but I wonder how often the owner’s of these sites actually test the speed and compare the competition as Redfin has? As for individual agent sites, it is less clear who is the winner as most don’t include any sort of mapping technology on their sites, unless they are powered by a portal partner.

Which mapping solution do you like to use?

So who else

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