4-page Case Study - Posted 7/24/2008
Views: 240
Rate This Evidence:
Realtors Association Improves Services for Agents and Buyers with Mapping Technology
The Houston Association of REALTORS® (HAR) provides online real estate services for property buyers and real estate professionals in Houston, Texas and surrounding areas. The second largest local REALTOR® association in the United States, HAR has 27,000 members, 73 employees, and four facilities. HAR needed to make it easy and exciting for individual buyers to search for specific property listings out of the more than 60,000 listings on the HAR Web site. The association used Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology to integrate mapping functions with the property search applications on HAR.com, creating an engaging search experience that has increased user satisfaction and delivered value to HAR’s REALTOR® members.
Situation
The Houston Association of REALTORS® (HAR) is the second largest local REALTOR® association in the United States, with 27,000 members, 73 employees, and four facilities. HAR provides online real estate services for property buyers and real estate professionals in the greater Houston, Texas metropolitan area. At HAR.com, buyers and agents may find residential and commercial property listings, consumer resources, and business tools.
HAR’s Multiple Listing Service (MLS) provides REALTORS® with tools to succeed in Houston’s competitive real estate market. Real estate agents who subscribe to the MLS may use it to access more than 60,000 property listings. From any computer with an Internet connection, REALTORS® may search all MLS listings, or post listings that may include property photos, virtual tours, and PDF documents. They can e-mail listings to clients, create comparative analyses, and may set specific criteria to automatically inform clients about new listings.
HAR.com is a free public Web site that provides valuable exposure for the listings that REALTORS® post on MLS. HAR.com gathers more than one million unique visitors per month, 80 percent of them searching for property listings. Property buyers can search listings and access other important information like school locations, community information, and market overviews.
To provide its MLS subscribers the most value, HAR needs to make it easy and exciting for individual buyers to find the specific properties they will want to see out of the more than 60,000 listings on HAR.com.
HAR recognized that integrating a mapping feature into the property search applications on HAR.com would provide a high level of value to real estate buyers and agents. Property location and local circumstances are often among the primary criteria for buyers. But location data like zip codes, subdivision names, or even street intersections often provide only limited utility.
“People may know where they want to live, but MLS area-names or zip codes might mean nothing to a consumer when searching online” says Taqi Rizvi, Chief Technology Officer at the Houston Association of REALTORS®. “
HAR decided to deploy advanced mapping technology on HAR.com to give property buyers actual visual insights into neighborhoods and communities. The association sought a mapping feature that would be simple to use but powerful enough to provide users with a conceptual view of property locations, including property details and area information.
Due to traffic on HAR.com doubling annually, HAR also required a mapping solution that could expand as the Web site continued to grow, and that HAR developers could easily integrate into existing HAR.com search applications. Finally, the association wanted to maintain its position as a cutting-edge real estate information provider. “Internet mapping technology is going to be an increasingly critical tool in real estate, and mapping technology is a big part of the HAR.com brand,” says Rizvi.
Solution
HAR began with an outsourced mapping solution, but the association quickly decided that it could more easily offer a solution with all the features it wanted by developing its own mapping application in house. The IT professionals at HAR developed an application using Google mapping technology. HAR was satisfied with the performance of the application, but the Google licensing agreement had a page-view limitation that would conflict with projected growth for HAR.com.
 |
If you want to stay competitive in the real estate industry, you have to have a solid mapping platform, and Virtual Earth is that platform for us. |
 |
|
Taqi Rizvi
Chief Technology Officer, Houston Association of REALTORS® |
|
|
The association’s Technology Advisory Group then evaluated Microsoft® Virtual Earth™ mapping technology and saw in its combination of features an opportunity for the enterprise to develop the kind of integrated mapping application it needed. The Microsoft unlimited transactions model and the high visual quality in Virtual Earth were the main factors that drove HAR’s decision. “One of the key needs we had from a budgeting standpoint was to have an unlimited solution,” says Rizvi. “The Virtual Earth bird’s eye imagery was another key factor in selecting Virtual Earth as our mapping platform. The bird’s eye view is very clear, high-quality imagery.”
Users may initiate a map search on HAR.com by zooming and panning a Virtual Earth map of greater Houston, and then using a polygon search tool to define a specific geographic search area on the map. The search area can be defined by city or district boundaries, neighborhood street grids, or any other user preference. For instance, a home buyer could define a long narrow search area surrounding a major commute arterial. The user can then display all listings in the defined search area, or refine a search with several criteria, including size, price, or school proximity.
Holding the mouse pointer over listing markers displays a details page about the listing, including photos. Users can zoom in to listings in several views: a road map view that can generate driving directions from any location, an aerial photo view, a hybrid aerial/road map view, and the bird’s eye view. The bird’s eye view provides high-resolution photo images of listings from north, south, east, and west views. Users have the ability to actually see a property in its location and view nearby properties. They can evaluate the visual character of the neighborhood, or even the density of tree cover.
Developers at HAR also integrated Virtual Earth with Microsoft MapPoint® Web Service to incorporate a “nearby places” search into the mapping application. Now, when a user clicks a search area, he or she can see the location of restaurants, shopping, hospitals, schools, parks, or other facilities relative to listed properties. “Virtual Earth makes it easy for our developers to integrate mapping on HAR.com,” says Rizvi. “So far, there’s been nothing that we wanted to do that we were not able to do.”
Benefits
By using Microsoft Virtual Earth to build an interactive mapping application for HAR.com, the Houston Association of REALTORS® created an engaging search experience on its Web site that will increase user satisfaction and deliver value for the real estate professionals who are its MLS subscribers. Site users are more engaged by the mapping application, staying longer on the site, searching more listings, and receiving more relevant search results.
HAR is using Virtual Earth mapping technology to develop innovative, effective means for showing properties, and to provide buyers with a complete view of properties and neighborhoods. “With Virtual Earth, we are offering a whole new process for looking at homes,” says Rizvi. “People can draw the area within a neighborhood they wish to live in.”
Improved User Experience
HAR is using its mapping application to improve the user experience on HAR.com by offering engaging tools and intelligent ways to provide accurate, relevant, comprehensible information. “The mapping is the stickiest content on our Web site,” says Rizvi. “It allows interaction, and people love to interact. But with any search application, it’s really how relevant the search results are. With Virtual Earth, people get real meaning form their search results.”
Growth Capacity
With the Virtual Earth development platform, HAR can grow its mapping application to keep pace with the growth of HAR.com and meet its evolving needs. “Based on what we have learned so far, it will be easy to move forward,” maintains Rizvi. “We won’t be just integrating mapping technologies but integrating other data sources to complement our MLS listing data. For example, from tax and education agencies, we have data about schools, neighborhoods, golf courses, and other factors that drive property sales.”
Competitive Advantage
HAR is using its advanced Virtual Earth mapping application to remain competitive in a rapidly changing real estate industry. “Mapping is the biggest change you will find in any real estate Web site,” says Rizvi. “If you want to stay competitive in the real estate industry, you have to have a solid mapping platform, and Virtual Earth is that platform for us.”
Microsoft Virtual Earth
The Microsoft Virtual Earth platform is an integrated set of services providing quality geospatial data, rich imagery, cutting edge technology, and dependable performance that helps organizations visualize data and provide immersive end-user experiences. With ongoing investments in innovation driven by customer feedback, the Virtual Earth platform continues to offer new map detail and imagery, feature enhancements, and robust platform capabilities.
For more information, visit
www.microsoft.com/virtualearth
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Houston Association of REALTORS® products and services, visit the Web site at:
www.har.com
