As I sat down outside Starbucks for my morning coffee today, I happened to glance over at the newspaper box.
The headline in USA Today screamed at me:
App developers are gearing up for Apple’s iPad
To say the least.
Tech blog GigaOm confirms as much, in a blog post yesterday: “the market for paid tablet apps alone is expected to top $8 billion within just five years.”
We’re on the verge of something big here. But, as the iPad’s shipping date nears, the temptation to succumb to digital fantasy is great.
We’ve already seen the magazine re-imagined and as impressive as this concept is, I think we tend to overshoot in our excitement and sometimes end up missing the little things.
This post is about those little things.
Like revamped todo lists.
Or a digital newspaper that you build yourself.
Or a more natural real estate search interface.
Yahoo’s new Sketch-a-Search application, which launched yesterday, illuminates some pretty cool possibilities. It’s dead simple. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch you can try this for yourself right now.
You just draw a boundary on the map and the app returns results within those borders.
In this case, it’s local restaurant results and reviews that pop up. But one can immediately see the application to real estate.
Forget clunky polygon search tools. You just draw.
Multi-touch tablets like the iPad, whether made by Apple or others, are going to usher in an a new era of simplicity in computing. An age where fear of technology removes itself as a barrier to adoption. Where the hassle of search is removed from search. Where we get back to a simpler time; when it’s just pointing, gesturing, drawing.
So when we sit down for our morning coffee in the not so distant future, it’ll be with a tablet in our hand. We’ll review our to-dos, catch up on the news and, yes, maybe even sketch out a quick real estate search.
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The iPad is will be the killer app for real estate agents.
Generally speaking, we don’t need big complicated programs and computing power. Most everything we do, can be done via the web or in an easy to use app. With the average age of an agent’s eye-ball at 54 years, a readable sized iPad, that fits into a purse, does everything from contracts, email and seach, for a few hundred bucks, it’s a no brainer.
[...] New Yahoo! app “sketches” the future of real estate search – With the iPad and the even cooler WePad devices coming this, things will changes. These will be [...]
No need to draw a border. Why not just simplify it even further and just “zoom” to the area you are interested in. Since you’re likely to need details like the side streets the properties are on anyway and other details that are not likely to show up until you zoom to some pre-defined threshold.
The other issue that is involved with ANY mapping application is what you get is only as good as the data going in. Unfortunately for the most part it still falls on the agent to verify the location. Address data is 100 times better than it used to be, but I would guess maybe as much as half our MLS listings are geo-coded correctly. I see this as a feast or famine feature…better in the large urban areas and less so in more rural settings like mine.
Still, not to rain on the party. I’m glad to see tablet and tablet apps finally coming of age.
I started using tablet systems almost 10 years ago. I had built a number of “Interactive Commerce” apps for different industries at the time. We were using tablets with built in webcams that you could flip to one side of the tablet or the other. One application was as a remote support application where the tablet was attached to a printer or some other tech product in a Best Buy store. If you had a question you simply touched the screen and you were immediately routed to the call center for that product and you conversed live with the remote sales person who then answers your questions. It was similar to a Skype call where you could see the remote sales agent and they could see and converse with you. The remote sales person could even send to the tablet remotely controlled content like videos, 3D models of the product, whatever to answer questions and help make the sale.
A real-estate usage was for doing live remote open houses. Similar to what Bambuser is capable of today, we would setup a high speed wireless connection in a home and conduct a live open house. Visitors would visit a pre-set website and be able to converse live with the agent who would walk around the house in real-time doing online video tours. We did this for a high end neighborhood here in Cary, NC. It was an instant hit.
I think this would be a great way of selecting comps around a subject property. Just type or tap the location of the subject property on the map and draw the area you wish to pull comps data from the MLS. This would be a great addition to an iPad version of our Cloud CMA web app.
We originally had polygon searching in Cloud CMA but quickly ditched the idea because of how much trouble agents (and ourselves) had with the “clunky” multiple mouse clicks polygon searching forces.
This post was mentioned at OnBlog: “Joel Burslem at 1000watt had a great post yesterday about the potential for application developers in using Apple iPad. Multi-touch technology, as Joel says, will bring back simplicity in search…”
[...] New Yahoo! app “sketches” the future of real estate search by Joel Burslem at 1000Watt Consulting [...]
Very cool. It would be easy to put homes for sale inside those lines
[...] New Yahoo! app “sketches” the future of real estate search [...]
I think this would be a great way of selecting comps around a subject property. Just type or tap the location of the subject property on the map and draw the area you wish to pull comps data from the MLS. This would be a great addition to an iPad version of our Cloud CMA web app.
We originally had polygon searching in Cloud CMA but quickly ditched the idea because of how much trouble agents (and ourselves) had with the “clunky” multiple mouse clicks polygon searching forces.