How important is mapping technology? Just ask Waze

Sometimes you see one of the big tech heavyweights like Yahoo, Facebook or Microsoft snatch up a business for a bazillion dollars and you begin to wonder what they see in that company.

Yahoo just purchased the blogging platform Tumblr for $1 billion and heads started scratching. Sometimes those acquisitions don’t always work out.

Yahoo once paid more than a billion for Mark Cuban’s broadcast.com. And where is broadcast.com now? Who knows.

However, one company that seems to be on top of the acquisition game is Google. You’ve heard of YouTube. Some say it could replace TV. Whoa. Good move Googilians.

Google is about to make another acquisition, this time with mobile-mapping company Waze. And yes, the sale price is just over a billion. (That seems to be the magic number now, like the $1 price tag in a vending machine.)

Waze has nearly 50 million users who they use to gather input to improve directions and display traffic and road-hazard information. This would provide incredible social features for Google’s navigation tools. Tools that will keep Apple and others at bay.

Heads might start scratching. But not here at SpatialMatch, the map-based real estate tool.  Because, with today’s geo-technology, location has grown in value.

If you think about it, a map is basically just another algorithm, just like search.

And as we know in this Internet-era,  the almighty algorithm puts a whole new spin on everything. Locations and distances and addresses can all be crunched together into data of zeroes and ones.

A data equation that a savvy real estate professional can use to maximize their marketing of a property.

A Realtor no longer has to tell a home buyer that a certain property is near a school if you go up the road and make a left at the convenience store and drive oh, about a mile past the post office and turn right after the third light.

It’s exact location can be shown on a geo-based tool like SpatialMatch.

Just as important, other results of a search for schools can be illustrated on SpatialMatch as well. As can the data about that school – number of students, student/teacher ratio, test scores, etc.

With this enhanced search capability a consumer can compare schools better than ever. Maybe School A is close but not a great fit for Johnny Student. The algorithms can show that perhaps School B a half-mile down the road is a better alternative.

An alternative that results in Johnny excelling in school, getting into Stanford University and creating his own company which is acquired in two years by, well, by now you know the story.

Real estate brokers and agents need to know that mapping technology, combined with advances in the sorting of Big Data, has made tremendous leaps and bounds.

They need to incorporate these spatial advancements into their websites, their marketing and their overall thinking.

Location is still key. But local knowledge of location is no longer stored only in someone’s head. It’s in a database. The SpatialMatch database.

And you can embed a widget that accesses this storehouse of hundreds of thousands of data bits about schools, businesses, roads, parks, hospitals, airports, and more.

Google’s purchase of Waze is not crazy. It’s smart. Get smart about real estate mapping technology on your site.

For a tour of the SpatialMatch map-based real estate data widget, click here.

To read about the Waze purchase. click here.