European clones for Housingmaps and Trulia

One of the big announcements that Google reserved for the Where 2.0 Conference, the availability of free Google-based geocoding , not only for the US, but for Spain, France, Italy and Germany, is having immediate effects. The most obvious, to me, is that this will boost continental real-estate mashups.

Look at this beta, http://www.revoluz.com/ made by the people of Panoramio (I was happy to met with them at Where 2.0) using Loquo.com data. Ubaldo Huerta, Loquo's master, helped them including the addresses in the feeds from Loquo, so Revoluz becomes the most similar European thing to the famous Housingmaps, which combining Craigslist (and Loquo is the Spanish Craigslist, bought by eBay last year) and Google Maps, was the first big mashup that deserved that name. So, any other can easily do the same, no screen scratching needed. Most addresses are not explicit enough for precise geocoding, but Loquo's big asset is visible price, so uncommon in Spain, where most agents don't mention the price of a house.

Another one, an Italian example: http://www.maiom.com/mappa.

Now that we see this in Continental Europe, the absence of UK geocoding in Google's offer becomes more obvious. I heard some English people at Where 2.0 and the Google Geo Developed Day that they felt like being 3rd World following the geocoding announcement...

However, the real-estate mashup environement is more active in the UK, despite expensive geocoding. There's a more advanced Internet and entrepreneurial culture there, both for customers to use the net to search homes, and better ground for start-ups to blossom. And this is the result of that:



The latest brittish real-estate website that I have noticed is Nestoria. Its look and feel resembles Trulia, that great US site. Very professional, apparently tied to the geo-hacker community... The continental mashups quite far from that level.