E-Media Tidbits

The real-estate advertising picture for newspapers looks increasingly grim (as I noted in an item here last week). Well, here's more bad news for traditional publishers, courtesy of Michael Harrell of Colorado Future, which has created a Web search engine for Colorado homes that utilizes Google Maps and Google Earth.

Colorado Future is one of the first businesses in the real-estate industry to tap into Google's satellite mapping tools, which anyone with a little tech knowledge can do. You can search for a home by viewing a satellite image (with street names overlaid) of the area you're interested in; homes for sale are signified by Google's pointer balloons. Click on a home and a balloon window pops up with basic details and a thumbnail photo of the house. A click on "Details..." brings up the agent's full property listing.

Below is a sample using Google Maps; the Google Earth version (which requires a download of that free application) gets even more detail and a 3-D viewpoint. As Harrell describes it, "This gives users the ability to fly around, as if they were in a helicopter, taking a tour of homes that are for sale."

Harrell says that while his company is one of the early real-estate pioneers in this, he thinks it will be commonplace soon. (Here's another early adopter.) Also possible is a future where local real-estate companies do most of their advertising with search engines. Colorado Future is one of those companies, doing only advertising on Google (with "great results," he says).

Will there still be newspaper housing ads in the future? I'd guess that their numbers will dwindle over time as more Realtors employ this new technology. It's about results, after all, and if interactive satellite databases and search-engine contextual advertising are driving the most business, there becomes less rationale for real-estate agents and brokers to spend money on traditional newspaper advertising.

At the very least, newspaper online classifieds programs should be experimenting with Google Maps and Google Earth for themselves.