Visionary Markets with Mashup

A Northwest Arkansas Realtor is taking advantage of state-of-the-art Web technology to tout the development properties listed under her sign.

Cassie Elliott is the owner of the Centerton-based consulting business Visionary Milestones. She’s also a Realtor with Hull & Co. of Bentonville.

In March, when Elliott took some aerial photos of her mostly rural, mostly Highfill-based listings to Justin Williams at Pixelbenders in Rogers, she told him she wanted something different for her Web site. She wanted something that would help sell development and investment properties and stand out from the plethora of other Realtor sites in Northwest Arkansas.

Williams and his partner, Mike Hall, didn’t know it at the time, but they were about to build the area’s first “mashup” to use Google Maps.

Mashup, as one word, is the Web’s most commonly used form of the words “mash” and “up.” In Web vernacular, a mashup is a site that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new site or service — a hybrid. “Mash up” or “mash-up” is generally used to refer to the mixture of two songs to create a new one.

In short, Elliott’s site ( www.visionarymilestones.com) gives prospective buyers a bird’s eye view of property using satellite images published by Google Maps, a tool she hopes will help lure investment buyers from Dallas, Los Angeles or New York to any of her $23 million in listings. The site has only been live since about the first of July.

From the Web site, anyone can view a satellite image of Elliott’s listings and the surrounding lay of the land, in most cases down to a blurry treetop.

Elliott has been a licensed Realtor for about a year and a half, and her listings, which are mostly commercial and open for development, are concentrated in and around Highfill and the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport.

As of early July, she’d brought in about $5 million in sales so far this year.

Elliott wouldn’t say how much she paid Pixelbenders to build the Web site, and Williams wouldn’t say how much he charged.

But Elliott said she’s spent about $15,000 so far this year on all of her marketing, which includes the Web site, newspaper ads and detailed full-color handout materials.

That figure doesn’t include her realty signage, which cost her about another $10,000.

“It’s a long range marketing tool,” she said about the Web site. “It’s a constant advertisement.”

Overall, she thinks the site will prove to be the best bang for her marketing buck.

Navigatin’

From the Visionary Milestones home page, a user can point their mouse at one of four categories (residential, commercial, investment and real estate). After one of the categories is selected, a map appears in the middle of the Web browser with Visionary Milestones’ logos as markers pointing at various properties.

From here, users can zoom in or out, left or right with controls located in the upper left corner of the map.

Buttons marked “map,” “satellite” and “hybrid” are in the upper right corner of the map. In satellite or hybrid mode, one can view the entire planet when zoomed all the way out, or blurry images of the Earth around a property when zoomed all the way in.

In hybrid mode, viewers get a graphical map with streets and borders laid over a satellite image — a tool that leaves little to guesswork and, Elliott hopes, lots to the imagination about where to place a hotel or subdivision.

Click on one of VM markers and information about the property pops up.

Click on “details” and a printable page loads in the browser with a satellite image, other photos and more information including the MLS number and the price.

“I’m a believer in information,” Elliott said.

She eventually wants the site to be a library of sorts with links to information from various area planning commissions, zoning ordinances and more.

The site is designed so she can add and delete listings as needed without having to rely on Pixelbenders.

“It’s exciting,” she said.

Trendy Too

The people at Google Inc. declined to talk with the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, so we don’t know how many sites are linked to Google Maps.

But Mike Pegg of Waterloo, Ontario, in Canada, runs a blog called www.googlemapsmania.blogspot.com. In an e-mail interview, he said he lost count of the mashed up map sites at about 800, but guesses there are about 2,000 just on his blog that use Google Maps in some form.

BusinessWeek recently reported that Google Maps is No. 2 worldwide for map searches, but there is a 20 percent gap between Google and No. 1 MapQuest.

Asked if he’d seen a lot of Realtors use Google Maps as a marketing tool, Pegg wrote, “Realtors? No. Internet entrepreneurs out to change the online real estate industry, yes.”

He said sites like www.homepricemaps.com and www.2realestateauctions.com help buyers compare house prices, but to use it as a listings tool isn’t at the top of the mapping craze.

According to many news stories about mashups, real estate is one of the hottest areas in the practice.

“Most of this is from average people and startups that are challenging the status quo in the real estate industry,” Pegg writes.

“Realtors have been slow to harness what is relatively easy technology to use.”

Highfill Heaven

Elliott has a degree from the University of Arkansas in graphic design but has never really practiced it, she said. Instead, she worked at a title company through college and after she graduated stayed in title work.

Eventually she became the Highfill city clerk where she learned all about city government, development, easements, planning and zoning, she said.

“I love research and putting a project together,” Elliott said.

She does consulting work through Visionary Milestones mostly for cities and developers, and the background gives her a leg up as a Realtor. She has the know-how and connections to help out-of-area investors get projects re-zoned or easements juggled in their favor.

She is focused on Highfill and its surroundings as a yet untapped promised land for development in Northwest Arkansas.

Elliott’s degree taught her, if not marketing savvy, at least to have a good eye. Her main goal with the site was to make it different.

“I didn’t want it to look like everybody else’s,” Elliott said.

That direction, and an armload of aerial shots — crucial to out-of-town developers looking for investments — is what she took to Williams and Hall after shopping her business around other Web site developers.

Pixelbenders

Hall said he didn’t necessarily start out to build a mashup for Elliott.

He just began looking at the aerial photos and comparing them to what was on Google Maps.

He realized they were pretty much the same, and he had an “Aha!” moment.

Basically, he said, he was just looking for an easy way to manage the amount of information Elliott wanted on her site and give users an idea of where the properties were in relation to landmarks.

“Not everyone has a head full of latitude and longitude coordinates,” he said.

Williams is Pixelbenders’ graphic designer, the one who makes sites look nice and clean.

“It’s the back programming that makes that site work,” he said.

The two have been partners for about seven years and they estimate that they’ve developed more than 100 Web sites including one for Fayetteville’s Dixie Management Co., the Oklahoma Democratic Party and radio station Hot Mix 101.9 FM.

As for getting Elliott and Visionary Milestones’ site noticed out of the millions of other sites, Williams said he and Hall have developed a system for meta tags, the series of words Web sites use to get noticed by certain searches.

Many Pixelbenders sites have hit the top three in various searches without having to pay for the privilege, Williams said.

“She’s gonna find herself high up in the search engines,” he said.

Mashup Mania

Mike Pegg publishes the blog, www.googlemapsmania.blogspot.com, which looks at sites linked to Google Maps.

He said the technology is relatively easy and that depending on the amount of data, a mashup to Google Maps could be created within a few hours.

The technology has quite a following with sites mapping everything from where sex offenders live ( www.mapsexoffenders.com) to where to find golf courses (www.golfbonk.com).

One of the most useful sites Pegg has seen is www.weatherbonk.com that provides many weather sources mashed up in one application and over a Google Map.

One of the most useless he’s seen? It’s at www.zefrank.com/sandwich/tool.html. “This site allows you to find out where you would end up if you were to drill a hole directly to the other side of the world. The Earth Sandwich is a play on putting a piece of bread on either end of the two points and making an earth sandwich,” Pegg wrote. “It dispels the myth of your mother telling you that you’d reach China if you kept digging a hole at the beach or in your backyard as a kid.”

Other real estate related sites can be found through Pegg’s site at www.googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/#housing.