The Cool House: Re-visualize real estate three ways

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Re-visualize real estate three ways


Trulia.com, the real estate search website, has come up with three really cool ways to view real estate.
The first Trulia Snapshot is straight porn. Search by town and state and refine by price point or listing time, then gawk to your heart's content. At the moment it only works really well in the big cities but that's what we all want to know isn't it: What do you get for $40,000,000, the most expensive listing in Manhattan? A 5 bedroom, 6 bath minimalist condo designed by Richard Meier overlooking the Hudson River baby, that's what.
The second tool, Trulia Hindsight, takes Visual Earth maps and digitally superimposes data on them, tracking the growth of towns and cities like Madison Wisconsin and Aspen, Colorado. Watch populations grow and decline, search by town or street. Waste a lot of time in a really fun way.
My favorite, though, is this fantastic awe-inspiring video that visualises where people are searching for real estate on Trulia. At the moment both its coverage and its usefulness are limited but plans are in the works for tools to help real estate agents more efficiently market homes. As it says on their blog: It’s sort of like Amazon Recommends for real estate.
The tools have been developed in partnership with the terrific design and technology firm stamen. Go over there to see more wondrous ways to display data, including Cabspotting which I marveled at in Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA earlier this spring.

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