Street View Expands to UK and Europe

Google Street View has expanded with launches in the UK and The Netherlands last week and more cities covered in Spain, France and Italy.

Street View, which is already available in other regions, including New Zealand, is a new feature for Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate 360 degree street-level imagery of the UK’s towns, cities and regions. It has the potential to greatly enhance a property-searcher’s understanding of a neighbourhood, allowing them to view the property in question as well as the houses, neighbourhood and streets around it.

findaproperty.com was selected as the only UK property portal launch partner for last week’s debut of Google Street View.

In a statement about the launch, Chris Boorman, Head of Product Development at findaproperty.com said:

“We are naturally delighted to partner with Google for this launch. Street View is a genuine innovation in mapping and fits extremely well with the existing technology on each of our sites. It makes finding the right property even easier and we fully believe Street View will become a fundamental part of every property search.”

The company says that the technology will equally help estate agents and developers to create a comprehensive picture of an area prior to the first viewing - bringing key features, which may positively influence a decision to buy or rent, to the fore at the earliest stage.

Street View is available on findaproperty.com listings located in major UK towns and cities including London, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, York, Newcastle, Southampton, Bristol, Swansea and Glasgow. findaproperty.com was also very quick to incorporate Street View into its Area Guide pages for towns and cities, with twenty-two pages already live.

Boorman said that Street View will complement their member agents’ listings and encourage potential buyers and renters to spend more time investigating their next home, and that “it also neatly supplements the agent’s role as the local expert with functionality that brings a property search to life”.

findaproperty.com’s parent company, The Digital Property Group, said that this cutting-edge technology will soon appear on the other three portals owned by the company: primelocation.com, homesandproperty.co.uk and findanewhome.com.

The partnership placed findaproperty.com in a unique position as the only property portal chosen for the launch of Street View, giving it an extra, albeit short-lived, edge until other portals integrated the new technology.

By this week the application had already been adopted by leading Scottish property search website s1homes.com so Scottish homeseekers can take a virtual walk around every property for sale or rent in Scotland’s four main cities: Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Dundee.

Across the Channel in the Netherlands Google Street View launched with local property portal funda.nl last week.

Having also launched Street View in France, Spain and Italy last year, Google has recently added more cities to Street View in these countries, around the south of France, Zaragoza and the Amalfi coast. While it’s been put to many uses, from tourist boards to property portals, Street View seriously enhances a user’s ability to get to know the local area, while perusing properties online.

It’s an amazing product, but Street View has most famously been the subject of controversy over privacy, and has spawned websites like streetviewnederland.nl, which highlights some of the more interesting and unusual things the Google cameras have captured in The Netherlands.

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