Real Estate and Technology

Dave Roberts Computer technology and the Internet have revolutionized the search for a home. Twenty five years ago the gold standard in real estate searching was a phone book sized publication with grainy black and white images. Updates were provided via thermal fax paper over 300 baud modems. 300 baud...slow enough to read as it printed. Today we have some amazing capabilities. If there's one improvement to searching that I would put at the top of my list, it's map-based searching. Making a great thing even more flexible and powerful, I now offer IPhone enabled real estate search for Sonoma County and the North Bay.3803

Map Based Searching
This web mashup from RealBird integrates listings from the Sonoma County MLS with Google maps to create a visual real estate search tool for Sonoma County homes for sale as well as homes for sale in Healdsburg, Sonoma, Sebastopol, and other Sonoma County towns and unincorporated areas. The navigation should feel natural for people who have worked with Google Maps before. You navigate on the map by using the "hand' cursor to drag the map around. You can also zoom in and out to see homes for sale on individual streets.

Map based real estate search detailIn addition to the map view, you can choose to look at aerial photos, a terrain view, or a hybrid of map and aerial photo. In just a few minutes you can find all the homes for sale near Twin Hills school or within five blocks of the Healdsburg Plaza or within walking distance of Annadel Park in Santa Rosa. This is a revolution for ease of searching. Newspaper classified ads, long a mainstay of real estate, are unable to compete with the power and sophistication of a system that doesn't just give you an address, but lets you see exactly where the house is in the town you are searching. That power just begins to tell the story of map-based searching.

It's not just about the location. Hovering your cursor over a marked property brings up a picture of the house with price and address information. You can quickly cruise over dozens of homes in a minute or two as you look for pricing and a quick thumbnail that may entice you to find out more. Simply clicking on the house icon brings up more details include a link (more info) for a full sized detail sheet. It's possible with an hour or two of investigation to narrow your search from hundreds of potential listings to the three or four that you would like to visit. That's a revolution.

 

Sales Trend Analysis

I work with a sophisticated market analysis company, Altos Research, to produce weekly reports about many of the popular residential areas in Sonoma County. The chart below updates automatically and tracks the median single family home prices in Sonoma County cities. You can sign up on the left for a free market report includes data like this and much more that I mail out weekly. All I need is your email and a password. I don't share the list with anyone.

Sonoma County Market Report Chart

In addition to providing these usefu tools you can use on your own, I am also happy to configure our current MLS system to set up a personalized web site for you that will send you an email as soon as properties in your price range and preferred neighborhoods are listed. Many of my clients are closely watching the REO (bank owned) property market and they find the automatic notification when bank owned listings hit the market gives them a competitive edge in this very active segment of the market.

I'm proud to be a Realtor® affiliated with Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty and the new Artisan Sotheby's International Realty coming to Santa Rosa soon. I look forward to working with you.

If you can write about a neighborhood you know well, send your story to me so I can add it to the site. I'll be happy to give you credit...or not. It's up to you.

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