Like over 90% of real estate shoppers, when you decide it’s time to shop for your dream home, the first place you head is the Internet. Online real estate shopping has a wide range of advantages: you save time, money and gas and are able to narrow down your options more efficiently.
However, online real estate shopping also has its drawbacks. Without visiting real estate in person, it’s hard to get an accurate idea of the look, feel, and atmosphere, not to mention the surrounding amenities. Have you ever wished you could explore a piece of real estate comprehensively without leaving the comfort of your own home?
With online mapping tools, you can. Popular high-tech options such as Bing Maps, Google Maps, Google Earth or Yahoo Maps allow you to view real time images of a location, zoom in, examine the area from different angles, and more. When finding your next home is just a click away, real estate shopping becomes relaxing and fun.
With all the online mapping options available, which one should you choose? For a quick glance or to find directions, any online mapping tool will do. But for serious real estate shopping, you’ll want to use the most cutting edge technology available. You’ll need an integrated set of services that provides rich imagery, quality geospatial data, and robust performance. For online real estate shopping, nothing will do but a truly immersive experience.
Bing provides this fluid and easy user experience above and beyond the capability of any other mapping tool. Packed with rich features, but not as memory-intensive as Google Earth, Bing delivers precise and accurate views. You can get to know the neighborhood from a bird’s eye view, and use panning to explore close to home or farther abroad. The top-notch photorealistic imagery and stunning geo-specific 3D capability bring you as close to your real estate as you can get without physically traveling there.
Retired homeowners Linda and Rob used Bing to help them find their dream home—a beautiful renovated Victorian mansion with ivy climbing up the walls. “The bird’s eye view we get through Bing is amazing,” Linda says. “What I noticed about using Bing is that the imagery is taken on an angle. All the other mapping tools, such as Google Maps for example, use a straight down view, which makes it impossible to read signs on buildings or tell how high the buildings actually are. So with Bing, we got this incredible experience of being able to rotate all around the neighborhood in bird’s eye view.”
In addition to the advanced bird’s eye feature, Bing Maps offers a more intuitive user experience. When you are physically strolling through a neighborhood getting a feel for the property and its surroundings, you naturally explore without having to think about where you’re going or what you want to look at. Good online mapping should give you the same ability to shop for real estate intuitively and fluidly. First-time homeowner Grant was pleasantly surprised by this seamless experience. “I was used to having to type in addresses and manually search for properties,” he says. “It was actually simpler to visually navigate properties in Bing than to use menus and dialog boxes.”
Because Bing Maps is a comparatively recent newcomer to the online mapping industry, the platform is directly driven by customer feedback and has been able to more successfully mirror a physical user experience, rather than upgrading tired old technology. As online real estate shopping continues to boom, mapping technology will offer new and improved options. Since Bing Maps doesn’t require you to download software onto your computer, you will always enjoy the most current feature enhancements.
Eryn makes her living buying and selling real estate, and has been using Bing Maps since its inception. As a professional real estate shopper, she can’t afford to spend valuable hours visiting individual properties. “Bing helps me narrow down my options, fast,” she says. “Now that I can view satellite photos with really precise architectural details, the experience is as close as I can get to being there in person. When I’m shopping for real estate the big question on my mind is, what are the amenities around the property, what kind of neighborhood is this. Bing Maps lets me see the schools in the area, hospitals, parks, shopping centers and so on, in a multidimensional way. As the product keeps improving, I keep finding new ways to save time and money.”
In the realm of online mapping, there’s no doubt that Bing is the industry leader. How can you use Bing today to help you search for real estate online? Whether you’re a first-time home buyer, a seasoned homeowner, or a real estate junkie, Bing Maps will give you an immersive experience that goes beyond the “wow” factor to a core solution: making buying real estate online easy.
Team Sadler © 2015
Your Team For Real Estate
