Michael Wurzer posted (over at the FBS Blog) his commentary on the ever-roiling hype around map-based searching in MLSes and for real estate consumers, borne out of Real Tech LLC's implementation of polygon-based mapping for John L Scott.

Whenever I ask our client base what features they'd like to see added to our service, map-based searching (MBS, for short) inevitably takes one of the top three positions.  However, when pushed with the 5 Whys, virtually no one can get past "because xyz does it!"

I have closely followed the various online mapping options since they became financially accessible and widely accepted (roughly 3 years ago). However, based on numerous seminars and conversations with end customers -- as well as top people at the mapping vendors -- the reality is that mapping hasn't either A) matured sufficiently for, or, B) proven its value in, our market.

As I've pointed out on in several RE forums, I'm skeptical at best of the merit of broad, location-based searching. I personally believe the value is in context-based geography, such as "maximum distance to x school, y office building, and z office building". The problem is then the processing power (and licensed software) required to provide those results in a sub-second period... not an easy trick when you have to scale to thousands of searches per hour.

At last year's Connect SF, I had the opportunity to discuss at length the issues surrounding MBS with Microsoft's Live (nee Virtual Earth) Maps team.  Out of those conversations, Microsoft added off-map drive-time calculation for points (which Google also implemented mere days later).  Unfortunately, the reality of having to load several hundred candidate points and perform the calculations against their servers still proved too latent an exercise to be useful.

The average real estate consumer -- the should-be target of these features -- simply does not rank the featureset nearly as relevant as price, bed/bath count, and square footage... especially when beginning their search, which is how most of these tools approach the visitor.  In fact, I think most consumers will sacrifice location in return for a house that otherwise meets every need.

This year, we will add interactive mapping to the Favorites feature of our service, only because it will include multi-point route optimization (for planning drive-by tours and showings).  To me, this is the extent that the technology has provided value to the consumer.

I would much rather let the big corporate vendors spend millions figuring out what works, then implement those features for a few thousand dollars in a quarter of the time.