With Major Search Players Ramping Up Their Mapping Services, What Will Become of Real Estate Mapping Companies

“Map-based search is the future of online real estate search. It is much more intuitive and productive than searching only with menus,” - Gabriel Gross, president and co-founder of RealBird.

I read an article this morning about RealBird Mapping Service, which offers online mapping solutions for the real estate industry and thought to myself: "They better have one hell of a marketing team to survive."

Why? Because of clever people such as programmer Paul Rademacher, who are using new offerings from major search players to their advantage. His HousingMaps, combines CraigsList Real Estate Listings with maps from Google Maps to create a tool that lets people find housing simply by looking at a map.

Currently Google and MSN are gearing up for a map war with MSN Virtual Earth and Google Earth. And don't forget, there's also Amazon's A9 "Block View" Technology, which lets users virtually walk streets and see businesses, buildings and streets in two-dimensional photos.

So, with articles such How To Make Your Own Annotated Multimedia Google Map on Engadget I ask:

Would a brokerage pay for this service, when a programmer on their tech staff can implement one of these technologies into their current offerings?

See Also: Smile! You're On Google 3D Mapping

Google plans to create an online 3D map of San Francisco, and maybe other major US cities will follow later. To achieve this they will use special trucks equipped with lasers and digital photographic equipment to map the entire city. The trucks will need to drive along every street in San Francisco and will map the entire area. The lasers will measure the dimensions of buildings to create 3D frameworks, on which the digital photos can be mapped. Google's goal is to create similar online versions of other main US and overseas cities. The data will be used for Google Earth (Keyhole).

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