Redfin goes with Google Maps
Real estate brief
By Inman News, Friday, December 12, 2008.High-tech brokerage company Redfin on Thursday announced that it has picked Google Maps as its exclusive interactive mapping platform and will no longer use a mixture of Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth at the Redfin.com site.
"We decided to do this now because our two-year contract with Microsoft was up for renewal," Redfin announced at its corporate blog, and the decision was also based on the company's discovery of a faster way to apply a large number of pushpin icons using the Google Maps platform. That means Redfin will no longer carry Microsoft's multi-angle aerial views, dubbed "Bird's Eye" views, on its site. "In the end it was speed, speed, speed that convinced us to switch," according to the post.
The Redfin site has also been revamped to improve its detection of short-sale properties in Orange County and parts of the Los Angeles area, Redfin reported, and to enhance the navigation to neighborhood information from the site's map page.
***
What's your opinion? Leave your comments below or send a letter to the editor.
All rights reserved. This content may not be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, in part or in whole, without written permission of Inman News. Use of this content without permission is a violation of federal copyright law.
Bookmarking Sites
You must login or register to post a comment.
Submitted by Paul Cormier on December 12, 2008 - 7:31am.
It sounds more like cost and poor design that drove RedFin to change map platform. Firstly, you're not presenting a very good interface when you present your users 500 pushpins to choose from. Also, the speed improvement they quote is for IE6 users. That would be a minority of users.
Instead of asking our site visitors to sort through 500 properties, BestHomePro determines through a patented search technique their top 10, 25, 50 or 100 properties which we can render on the (Virtual Earth) map in milliseconds.
Not having Bird's Eye view creates a sub-par user experience.
Paul Cormier
www.besthomepro.com