Since Google first began adding real estate listings to Google Maps in mid-2009, the world of online real estate has been monitoring the company’s every move. Each upgrade brought more speculation on how Google was planning to change things for property portals, real estate agents, and property hunters.

Now, we have a clearer idea of where Google is headed.

At a Sydney press conference today, Google revealed what it described as its “vision for working with the real estate industry”. That vision involves, among other things, a marketing partnership with one of Australia’s most well known real estate agencies: LJ Hooker.

This new marketing push will see physical representations of the Google Maps “pins” appearing across 16 Sydney locations, from shopping centres to cinemas and even on Bondi Beach. Google says the co-branded pins are meant to encourage more Australians to head online to begin their real estate search, but with 87 percent of the population already doing so according to Nielsen, it’s clear this is a push to get Australians thinking “Google” when they think of online real estate.

Karim Temsamani, general manager of Google Australia and New Zealand, said today that Google Maps now links over 1,000 real estate websites across Australia and New Zealand. Along with LJ Hooker, Google also includes Ray White, First National and Century 21 amongst these partners, as well as smaller portals such as homehound.com.au and myhome.com.au. As pleased as Google seems to be with these partnerships, one big question remains: what of Australia’s market leader, realestate.com.au, and the number two player domain.com.au?

When quizzed about the relationship with the two portals, Andrew Foster, product manager for real estate search on Google Maps, remained diplomatic. “We’re happy to take listings from anyone,” he said, while confirming that there is currently no arrangement to take listings from either portal. “At this stage they’re choosing not to provide listings,” he said.

“We’re not sitting back and waiting for large providers,” Foster continued, emphasising that Google’s coverage is “diverse and comprehensive”, and that there is “genuine enthusiasm to be seen on Google” from the real estate industry.

Foster’s demonstration of the full extent of real estate search on Google Maps showed some possible reasons for that enthusiasm. Beginning with a simple keyword search for real estate in a certain area, users can now choose to refine their results further by layering results from other Maps searches, ending with a map that shows not only listings but also nearby restaurants and cafes, schools, businesses, and estimated transit times from place to place.

Clicking on any of the pins on this map will takes users to a Place Page, where they can find even more detailed information about a property. Photos, inspection times, floor plans, and videos from YouTube can all be included, along with Google’s Street View, which is currently being updated for Australia and New Zealand.

The Place Page is also where Google addresses the issue of multiple sources for a listing. Under the property’s details, a list of the sources is provided, so users can choose to find more information from the agency’s website, or go to the relevant property portal to continue searching.

google.com.au/realestatetools is another part of the push towards real estate agents. This is where Google is aiming to “cut through the clutter” and present real estate agents with all the Google tools it thinks could be useful. Needless to say, Maps is included, as are AdWords and YouTube.

Today’s announcements were all focused on the Australian and New Zealand markets, and Foster said there was nothing to announce in terms of real estate search on UK Google Maps or elsewhere. But if this latest push manages to draw in Australian and New Zealand property hunters, we’re guessing it will only be a matter of time before Google Maps real estate search gains momentum overseas as well.

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A new website has been launched in the UK to give renters the ability to publish reviews on properties, landlords, estate agents, and the local area.

The propertyreview.com allows users to upload their reviews for free and provides a search option so they can find reviews by location.

At the moment, there are around 30 reviews available, and while there are some with a rating of 100 percent that sound slightly like listings, many seem to be genuine impressions of properties, landlords, and agents.

Those who disagree with the content of the reviews can flag them as “dodgy content”, “spam”, or “just not true”.

While the website is aimed squarely at house hunters, agents may be able to make thepropertyreview.com work to their advantage by using it to keep track of their online reputation.

For more tips on controlling your online reputation, check out our article here.

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UK property portal findaproperty.com, which has just come out with an iPhone application, has also released a widget showing UK average house prices that can be added to any website.

The widget displays asking price data for both flats and houses in any UK town or county for either sales or rentals. findaproperty.com explains that it shows asking price changes for the last 90 days in both graph and tabular formats.

The widget takes a daily snapshot of the prices at which properties are advertised on the website for the last 90 days and then plots them on the graph. The widget’s graph features clickable data points, so the user can find out precisely how much the average asking price of a flat or house in that area was on a specific date. Asking price data is drawn from findaproperty.com’s database of over 600,000 properties.

Meanwhile, findaproperty.com parent company The Digital Property Group (TDPG) is touting the success of both findaproperty.com and primelocation.com over the past few weeks, claiming an increase in traffic has boosted the number of enquiries for its agents.

According to a company statement, on 18 January findaproperty.com recorded just short of 215,000 unique visitors, which is 11,400 individual visitors greater than the previous record set in August 2009. The next day, primelocation.com attracted just over 168,000 unique visitors, which is its recorded highest number.

TDPG says that in both cases this boost in visitors translated into enquiries for its agents, with lead totals for primelocation.com and findaproperty.com between 1 and 19 January increasing by 21 percent and 59 percent respectively compared with the same period in 2009.

The company also states that for the first 19 days in January its websites delivered a lead to an agent every 2.2 seconds, compared with a lead landing every 3.1 seconds in 2009.

TDPG sales director John Notley said these were “outstanding” numbers, even taking seasonality into account.

With TDPG’s parent company recently bringing globrix.com into the fold, 2010 looks set to be an interesting year as this portal network, along with zoopla.co.uk’s, tries to close in on that other UK property portal, rightmove.co.uk.

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Google Street View has been added to so many real estate websites by now that it’s almost an expected part of the listing landscape. But there could be a change on the Street View horizon.

A report from cnet.com explains that Google previously floated the idea of ads appearing in Street View that are tied to the listings in its Local Business Centre and Favourite Places program (click here for a full run-down of those Google offerings).

What makes it seem like more than an idea is Google’s recent filing of a patent application titled “Claiming Real Estate in Panoramic or 3D Mapping Environments for Advertising”. In other words, we could soon see something akin to virtual billboards appearing in a Street View image as users browse through an area.

Of course, this might sound like an extremely bad idea – a sure-fire way to turn people off Street View altogether. But searchengineland.com’s Greg Sterling remains optimistic. “Google will very carefully align what it perceives to be relevant ads with consumer queries and interests,” he says.

In the world of online advertising, this could open up a huge new advertising space. Much like the Augmented Reality applications developed by websites such as trulia.com, Street View could become a source of leads in itself. But exactly how this will all play out remains to be seen.

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US company Digital Map Products, which lists redfin.com, zillow.com, and trulia.com amongst its clients, has released a new mapping tool that visualises how home prices change over time.

The product, dubbed SpatialStream, animates property price fluctuations as colours on a map, changing from green to red as prices fluctuate. The company says this is an easy way to show what would otherwise be thousands of separate data points on a spreadsheet.

This video shows SpatialStream in action, displaying sales prices in Southern California changing over a three year period:

The product is aimed at developers, and allows them to choose various pieces of code to create the kinds of visualisations they need. Trial accounts are available, however the website does not go into detail about the cost of a subscription.

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Leading Dutch property portal funda.nl recently commissioned market research to find out what consumers thought of it. The results are as revealing for agents as they were for the portal itself.

The research, conducted by Heliview, showed just how important video and interactive floor plans are when it comes to listings. 53 percent of respondents said they were more likely to spend time looking at a listing if a floor plan was included, while 61 percent said they were likely to prefer listings if a video was available.

Heliview’s results were also enlightening when it came to public perception of the market-leading portal. A huge 81 percent named funda.nl as their preferred listing location when it came to promoting their house.

So, for Dutch agents at least, it seems skipping the market leader when placing property listings simply isn’t an option. In terms of listing content, the survey confirms what many already know: the more content, the better.

Looking for more ideas on listing content? Click here to see our tips on making your listings stand out.

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Let us know what you think of the new site by sending your feedback to editor@propertyadguru.com as we are constantly looking to improve and ensure we are presenting the most topical information to our readers.

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We first reported on UK-based single property website creation tool estatecreate.com when it launched in February last year. At the time, it was pitched as a challenge to agents in that it offered an alternative selling tool for home owners.

After launching, estatecreate.com decided to include an agent-focused option in its subscription offerings, allowing agents to create single property websites to promote their clients’ properties.

Since then, it seems agents have been clamouring for an option that doesn’t involve them creating these single property websites on their own. So estatecreate.com is now offering to do the website creation work in a 48 hour timeframe, and give it a property-specific domain name, for a fee of £99.

“estatecreate.com websites work out at around £30 each if an agent subscribes to our service, so we think £99 is a very reasonable price for having one built for you,” says Henry Yates, estatecreate.com founder and CEO.

estatecreate.com picked up two awards in 2009: Outstanding Achievement in Web Development at the Web Marketing Association’s 2009 WebAwards, and the Innovation Award from UK news website The Negotiator.

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A mobile presence will become a necessity. With the number of smart phone users growing by the day, there is an increasing expectation that your listings will be accessible via mobile. Whether it’s a website optimised for mobile, a downloadable application, or a yard sign that brings listing information to house hunters’ handsets, people will be looking for some way to access what you have to offer while they’re on the move.

Layar will start to gain real ground. As the number of smart phones grows steadily, so too will the number of mobile applications that make use of Layar’s Augmented Reality (AR) view of the world. With many real estate advertisers already putting AR to work, expect Layar to become much less unusual in 2010.

Mash-up applications – those that merge maps, real estate listings, and other neighbourhood information – will blow our minds. There are all kinds of possibilities for consumers and agents when it comes to online real estate: everything from finding the suburb with the lowest pollution levels to gauging where people most want to move to through an analysis of geo-tagged tweets.

Google will keep surprising us. 2009 saw Google make huge strides in online real estate. While there are still plenty of challenges to overcome, it seems highly unlikely that Google will slow down in 2010. For agents, the trick will be to stay on top of Google’s movements and focus on how each release can be used to their advantage.

Social media fatigue will set in. 2009 could easily be described as the Year of the Tweet, and Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube all saw substantial growth. But amongst people who use these tools for business, we predict 2010 will be the year the excitement wears off and many begin to focus on the return their social media use is bringing in.

Newspapers will sell even fewer ads. mediapost.com suggests 2010 could be the year newspapers hit bottom in terms of advertising revenue. Whether 2010 is the worst year for newspapers or if there are even slower years to come, the bottom line is that online advertising is only going to consolidate its position as the default option.

Now it’s your turn: have we hit the nail on the head or are we way off the mark? Bring on your best predictions for the new year in our comments.

[Image: theweatherpages.wordpress.com]

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John Reilly, CEO and publisher of realtown.com, had this to say about the future of the website:

“We’ve been working hard on a few large projects which we will be rolling out in the next few months. After building the agent infrastructure, we are shifting our efforts on bringing in consumers.

We’ll help out the consumer by giving them free, localised, information and advice. This means more interaction between the agent and the consumer, providing our members with the opportunity to build social capital. And, as a result, members will be more likely to get leads and referrals through realtown.com.”

realtown.com says its development dates back to 1995. Its features include an “ask the expert” section, a marketing and lead generation tools shop, and articles on the real estate business. Its members can also join various networking groups and communities to discuss professional concerns.

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