Blog Post: Bing Maps controls enhance property search experience

This is a guest post by Tim Maharry, Software Development Manager, of John L. Scott Real Estate.

John L. Scott Real Estate has been partnering with Microsoft on mapping projects for nearly eight years. In fact, we were one of the first real estate companies to offer map-based home searching way back in 2003. With Neighborhood Wizard™, released in 2007, we became the first residential real estate company in the nation to utilize the Microsoft polygon drawing technology to allow consumers to draw the exact boundaries of their desired search. In 2009 we released JLSConnect™, a customized Silverlight-based tool that we’ve continued to develop for the past two years. JLSConnect™ has come a long way, and we’re pleased with how the map search product now maximizes the benefits of the Bing Silverlight Map Control. While we’ve included a few screen shots of the product below, feel free to explore the product on our webpage to get a better look.

The combination of Microsoft Silverlight and Deep Zoom technologies, along with John L. Scott’s search technology, make the searching experience very smooth. With this update, customers can now specify all the same criteria they can on our AJAX-based map: property type, price range, beds and baths, etc. They can also filter their results to highlight upcoming open houses or pending and sold properties.

We’ve also made the product more powerful by adding the ability for customers to modify the shape of their search polygon. Customers can now add, move, and remove the points that make up their polygon, giving viewers unprecedented flexibility.

 

In addition to updating our JLSConnect™ to maximize the benefits of the Silverlight Map Control, we’ve also finished refactoring our AJAX-based interactive map search to use the new AJAX 7.0 Control. Due to the Control’s increased performance, we’ve been able to expand the maximum results to 500 properties.

And with the new seamless transitions between each map type, we now support polygons all the way down to Bird’s eye.

These are only a few of the updates we’ve made to our search tools. Please stop by JohnLScott.com to see how we took full advantage of the Silverlight and AJAX 7.0 controls.

- Tim Maharry

LSI LINEAR TECHNOLOGY LEXMARK INTERNATIONAL LEVEL 3 COMMUNICATIONS LAWSON SOFTWARE