Philippine Property Finder goes Live Beta
Philippine Property Finder is finally going on live beta testing this week after months in ‘development limbo’. The website offers some interesting features such as: Map-based searching – The visitor can use a Google Maps-based interactive map of the Philippines to check for property listing in various locations. For example clicking Ayala Avenue, Makati in the Map will yield this search result. Web-crawler – PhilippinePropertyFinder.com is essentially a real estate search engine much like what Google is to the web as a whole. It returns results from some of the top Philippine real estate property listing sites and redirects its visitors to the original websites where the actual property advertisement was posted. To date, it has crawled over 130,000 property listings. Featured Properties – The site also offers the option to post directly into its database for free. Property postings direct to the website are allowed rich html content as well uploading of up to three images. Functionality of this feature is patterned after Craigslist‘s, no membership required posting system. Property Statistics – Perhaps the most exciting feature of PhilippinePropertyFinder.com is its capability to generate statistical data on real estate prices and trends by analyzing the data it has collected. This data is summarized in here: http://www.philippinepropertyfinder.com/statistics. Individual search results are also provided statistical data such as average selling price, average floor area, average rental rates and average rental area for the location being searched. This gives the user a better idea on the prices he/she expects to pay in renting or purchasing property in a specific location. Click here for an example search of Quezon City and corresponding statistical data obtained from property listings in that area. We’re excited to offer more detailed and interesting data on real estate as our database grows bigger! Real Estate Archives – A comprehensive listing of ALL the properties listed in our site since our search spider started it’s regular crawl on November, 2009. Click here to view the Philippine Real Estate Archive.
PhilippinePropertyFinder.com
EACOMM R&D Labs has just released a proof of concept website: PhilippinePropertyFinder.com. This website is an example “mash-up” of Google Maps and Google Custom Search Applications. It was developed to showcase how two relatively easy to setup yet extremely powerful technologies can provide a powerful and useful tool for the general public. To use, simply use the map controls to zoom and pan across the map of the Philippines to a specific area of interest. Clicking on a point in the Map will initialize Google Map’s reverse Geocoding facility and indicate the specific region as stored in Google’s database. Clicking the “Search for Property in this Area” link will pass on the Geocoded data to Google’s Custom Search to search for property in that area using some of the more popular property listing websites in the Philippines. Alternately you can just enter the specific area you are interested in as text in the search box provided (but that takes away the fun part!). Note that we are looking to improve and offer more features in the near future so feel free to check back every now and then! VISIT PHILIPPINE PROPERTY FINDER NOW!
Google Maps Integration with PhilippineCompanies.com
We’ve been planning to integrate Google Maps with our Philippine Business directory/locator website since it was launched 2 years ago. However, we found the accuracy of the Philippine maps far from perfect, with very obvious descrepancies between the map-view and satellite views. This has changed in the past few months as can be seen by this fantastic street-view of Makati’s Central Business District (check out how even the one-way roads are labelled!). As such, we’ve finally decided to have Google Map viewer in the company profile pages of PhilippineCompanies.com. The system works by using Googe Maps’ Geocoding facility to determine the Latitude and Longitude of a location using the address information we have in our database. Accuracy is up to street level within Metro Manila and other major cities while the rest of the country would be on the municipal-level. We’re currently working on trying to improve the querying system as well as the way addresses are stored for Philippine Companies so that we can maximize the accuracy as we pass data to Google Maps. This is a daunting task however, with a database fast approaching 50,000 companies. As such, we’ve allowed visitors to edit map locations by pin-pointing the exact business location in the website’s registration page. With improved Google Map accuracy for the Philippines, we’re very excited in offering possible new Map-related Web Services in the weeks and months to come!