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Wish List: Replicating the territory
By: Cathleen Collins,
DistinctivePhoenix.com
Posted: Saturday, January 19th, 2008, 12:39 pm MST
Category: Wish List
I know we’ve been promised improvement in our ability to search by map. I hope this includes the ability to copy a territory that we’ve already mapped out into a new search. Quite often my buyer clients discover me because they are looking for homes in a particular vicinity of Distinctive Phoenix: certain historic areas and adjacent neighborhoods or areas that are within walking distance to the light rail, for example. Setting up a search that finds these homes and delivers them in a way that’s not too confusing for my client is a daunting task on Tempo. FlexMLS will be heroic if it enables us to:
* Overlay a map to select or reject houses in very precise locations, which are not necessarily adjacent. For example: Exclude any home on a super-fund site, in a flood zone, in the Luke AFB fly-over zone; Include residences along the light rail path, or facing golf courses (whether or not the listing agent completed the listing correctly, as long as the GPS is correct), within walking distance to a particular school, etc.
* Once we’ve defined an overlay, let us copy it to other searches. Once the territory has been defined for one search we need to be able to use that same definition for searches that we create for other clients.
On the subject of maps… Can we also draw the map we want to include/exclude on our search with an arial-hybrid map as the guide? For example, if a client says she wants to consider all houses within a certain area, but excluding those on a major thoroughfare and also excluding any that are adjacent to commercial or multi-family buildings, you might use the arial view to get a good idea of properties that your buyer would find objectionable.
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January 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Cathleen, much of what you describe can be done now in flexmls Web, including drawing search areas over aerials, having multiple search areas, and saving searches with search areas defined for later re-use. There also are are some great ideas here for us to consider in the future: (1) excluding map areas; and (2) being able to re-call search areas and groups of areas without using a pre-saved search. Thanks for the post!
January 21st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Along the subject of maps, one feature, that would save me an endless amount of time, is route planning. Let’s say my client wants to look at homes in Fountain Hills, and I develop a list of 10 homes to see. Fountain Hills isn’t a huge community, but it’s big enough that we need to be somewhat smart about the route I drive us.
Today, I take all of the addresses, bring them to Google Maps (by retyping them all), map it there, and then Google Maps can let me move a location up/down in the order, so that the route is optimized.
If Flex MLS provided just one thing, this process would be much simpler: Interface to Google Maps so that the list is there for me to do the route optimization.
March 16th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Ditto Steve Belt’s comment.