Galen Ward and Doug Cole of Rain City Guide have come up with a google-map-based real estate listing service that is really quite unique. Shackprices.com is a new site that shows where the home is on a google map. By simply mousing over the “push pin” in the map, a photo of the house appears in a pop-up window.
This allows you to gather information in several ways. It lets you see what homes in a certain neighborhood are selling for, it allows you to see how many home are available in a particular neighborhood (and where they are in the neighborhood without having to drive around), it allows you to see where the homes are in relation to schools, work, shopping, church, etc. It’s a unique way to shop.
Shackprices.com has taken it one step further by allowing you access to information on what other homes in the neighborhood have sold for, making it possible for you to see if the price of the home you are interested in is in harmony with everything else that’s gone on in the neighborhood.
This site features listings for the Western Washington area only, and so may not be of interest to you directly, but log on and play with it. In my opinion this is the future of how homes will be marketed. It puts a ton of information at your fingertips in a way that’s very easy to assimilate.
I liked the site a lot. It was easy to use and the suggested home feature is cool.
What were you thinking when you named this posting? Although the features on this website are probably a great way to help disseminate information about a home, people don’t buy homes based on information they see on a computer screen. They buy homes after visiting them and visiting other homes to see how they compare in real life (not just on paper, or on a computer screen). They buy homes after discussing their options with various professionals (which usually includes a real estate agent). They buy homes after someone helps them understand the entire process and helps them understand how to present an offer, how to negotiate counteroffers and how to do everything else necessary throughout the process.
The title of this posting suggests that, like stocks and other such things, people will log on, do some research, then click “buy” and somehow skip most of the traditional steps involved in purchasing a home. This will never happen.
The real estate junkie makes a great point. Homes will never be “sold” this way. What I should have said is marketed. Putting buyers together with sellers (i.e. marketing) is the name of the game — always has been, always will be. This is a great marketing tool — one that puts buyers and sellers together — and I believe it is how the future of marketing (not selling) homes will look. My mistake. I’ll be more careful in my future choice of words.