Is It Still All about Location?

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RISMEDIA, March 20, 2007-"Depending on who you ask, what you ask and when you ask it, sure it's all about location." A guarded yet insightful assessment from one of the industry's most progressive technologists, Patrick Jen, president and founder of NeighborhoodMatch Inc. He and his San Diego team have been quietly pushing the envelope of location-based Internet applications for more than two years.

"Everyone recognizes that value and equity are driven primarily by location," states Jen, "but it's more difficult to remember how important a role like choosing the right location plays in making a house a home."

It's the kind of insight that home buyers have traditionally relied on their agents to provide. Even aspects such as who your neighbors are, their family make-up, profession, education levels, even political affiliations each contribute to the character of a location. Until recently that's the kind of information that was only available from either a long time member of the neighborhood, or a professional real estate agent.

Advances in the integration of interactive mapping technologies with neighborhood demographics are starting to make that information more widely available to real estate agents and consumers alike. When you can add in knowledge about what to expect from the local schools, municipal services, fire and police protection, and even the quantity and proximity of businesses and services in a location, then you've got the makings of an informed intelligent decision. That's the level of knowledge, "the missing ingredient" that continues to make real estate brokers essential.

Access to that type of detailed knowledge appears to be the driving force behind several of the new location-based technology solutions like those being deployed by Location Inc, developers of www.Neighborhoodscout.com and a soon to be released international real estate search portal www.FindaHome.com. Imagine being able to describe in detail the type of neighbors and neighborhood you're interested in and then displaying houses ranked by how well they match up with your ideal location.

Developed with cutting edge patented technologies, the www.FindaHome.com portal will look to empower consumers with graphically rich maps, which are enhanced with color-coded charts, legends, and icons that help to distill all of that information, and more, into simple snapshots. It appears to be an alternative to the long boring, and sometimes costly reports. Simple comparative visual-rankings are designed to explain more in a few seconds than hours of pouring through exhaustive text-laden surveys and analysis would have allowed in the past.

In addition to launching this new location-based search method on its international portal, the FindaHome.com team will apparently be embedding its technology into the Web site of one top broker in virtually every market in the U.S. sometime later this spring according to a company spokesman in Chicago.

If location truly is a criteria that matters in the long term success and satisfaction of home buyers, then online search technologies will need to continue to evolve beyond the photo-album mentality of today's broker Web sites. Successful brokers will need to supply the kinds of in-depth knowledge that consumers have come to rely upon from today's real estate professionals.

For more information, visit www.FindaHome.com.

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