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Realestateplus launches

Fred Oliveira on May 9, 2007

If I (or the rest of the guys here at Webreakstuff) have been unresponsive in the last few months, you can - in South Park fashion - blame Canada. It’s finally time to spill the beans because the project we’ve been working on with the New Ventures group at Bell has finally launched: meet Realestateplus.ca.

Realestateplus

Realestateplus.ca provides users with several ways to find homes in Canada using search or visually using maps. Fact is Canada had no portal that took advantage of Ajax or mapping APIs to create a better home-finding experience, and that’s where RE+ comes in. The whole team behind the project built a pretty compelling product under some pretty tight time constraints, and as such, it is really rewarding to see everything fall into place with this launch.

Realestateplus

There are a lot of lessons learned that will probably blend into posts here in a very near future - on collaboration with big clients, QAing in an agile environment, scaling Ruby on Rails, and best practices for UX in this kind of portal. We’ll likely put up a case study about the project on our site soon, to shed some light on how we worked with Bell and the guys at Infusion Dev (the team behind the mapping implementation) in building Realestateplus. For now, though, we need to celebrate and rest for a few hours.


Comments on this post

Fraser Beach

Great Job Fred … this is a ground-breaking event for the real estate industry in Canada.

Fraser Beach
Broker of Record
RealEstatePlus.ca

Erik Mallinson

Please do something like this for the US now!

Scott

When I first saw this I thought you were joking. Seriously, how on earth does it impact any of your users to have ‘beta’ so prominently displayed like that?

Other than that, it looks nice. The pop-ups could use some work, i kept hovering without anything happening, finally I realized you have to wait a second. Just something unintuitive about the way it’s implemented.

Design looks nice otherwise. I sure could use a nice service like this for my current house search. By the way, I like the look of your blog - guess I’ve spent too much time reading this site from my RSS reader.

Fred Oliveira

Scott, the beta sign was a business decision and not on our hands. Personally I’m not a fan of using the beta label anywhere as you can read here. The maps aren’t ours, they’re the work of Infusion dev, but I’ll make sure your comment gets to their team.

I do appreciate the comments on the design of both the application and this blog. Thanks!

Uzi

Guys

Sorry to be the one to say this: THIS LOOKS LIKE A BAD RIP-OFF OF trulia.com

WTF?

Fred Oliveira

Uzi: It serves a similar purpose on a different market. You would probably say the same thing about others in this space (Zillow, Redfin, come to mind). Naturally Realestateplus was built with the knowledge of others in the same space, but that doesn’t mean they were (or ever could be) copied.

I can only assume you’re thinking about the layout of the site, but I’ll ask you this: try to wireframe a home-finding screen that involves maps, weight in the flow and IA, integrate the opinion of a whole team of people (with all the influences that may carry along) and see how you end up.

Ned Wootton

Just went to the web site. Looks cool, but says it has lost access to current info about homes for sale in Toronto. How come?

Lawrence

I have the same comment as Ned (Wootton). I even sent an email about this.
A great site by the way but for some reason, Ned’s concern and mine doesn’t seem to bother anyone!?!
The site claims to be running in “DEMO” mode.
There’s practically NO USE for a GREAT site that doesn’t display “REAL” information, don’t you think!?!

Fred Oliveira

Ned, Lawrence: The data issue is out of our hands and is being solved by the legal team of Bell Canada - it has to do with canadian laws, something that we naturally have no control over. There’s nothing we (as developers and designers) can do about that situation.

Vasile

Hi!

There’s a great site you designed, lots of interesting things in there. I have a suggestion, though: a search on an address, and the result to be the demographics for that address. It could be very useful for the users, even if you don’t have (yet) solved the legal issues regarding the MLS data.

Something to say?