Up to now, the biggest players in the real estate search game have been Trulia and Zillow, with features not offered by company sites, mls listings.com, and Realtor.com. The two major players are seeing significant traffic growth.
Google announced today that they have rolled out vast improvements in the way that they display real estate searches in their index; they are now included by default in the Maps view.
They have also rolled out brand new real estate specific landing page at maps.google.com/realestate.
So, as of today, if you enter a search like San Jose real estate on Google Maps, you’ll see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify “real estate” from the search options menu, but now it's easier to find available listings.
There are now lots of markers that will show not only the ten most relevant listings with pins on the map, but also show a small circle on every other listing in that area using the search results layer, so you can get a really good idea of the distribution of properties for sale. You can click on each marker and each small circle to get more detailed information about the property.
This feature means you can now conduct a real estate search around a specific neighborhood, or see at a glance all the properties close to a train station. You can also move the map to another area entirely to see listings there if you decide that another part of town is what you want.
Right now Google is only deploying these searches into its Maps results, so they are relatively confined. But this may only be the beginning.
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