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.
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