Me, writing on the Inman Blog, when Street View launched last year:
Clearly, this has great application in real estate, as you will now be able to scope out a potential neighborhood or property from the ground up. Of course, it still doesn’t beat seeing it in real life – but becomes another handy way to narrow down search results.
It remains to be seen whether Google will roll out this feature to its API users (Trulia et al.) or if it’ll keep this card close to its chest.
Sure enough they did open it up and today, Trulia became the first national search site to incorporate the Street Views (available in over 40 cities) into their search results – though others have already done it on a more regional level (see Brokers and Agents Who are Walking the Walk).
It’s definitely a very nice feature, and one that continues to keep Trulia ahead of the pack when it comes to rolling out new features that aide the search process.
With this news though, I thought it worth reminding FOREM readers that you can also embed Street View maps yourself on your own sites (see New Google Street Views Can Be Embedded on your Site). I’ve taken to using this myself a lot recently, especially when trying to communicate a specific location with multiple parties.
There are also a number of vendors who have automated the implementation of this feature to agents on their personal web sites (Diverse Solutions) or their single property web sites (RealBird).
