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FloorPlanner Aids Real Estate Agents in Floorplan Design

By: Reggie · Posted on June 5, 2007 · 4 Comments
Real Estate agents looking for a web 2.0 technology aimed at creating floor plans for home design, you are in luck! Suite75, an Amsterdam company, has built Floorplanner using Ruby on Rails, and Adobe Flash—two hugely popular Internet technologies. Floorplanner offers an elegant interface that is very easy to navigate. Floorplanner brings many sophisticated high-end features you would see in competitors such as AutoCAD, to the novice user’s level. Start by creating a new floorplan, pick structure outline and then simply drag and drop items from the library onto the canvas. All library items can be stretched, scaled, texture can be modified and colors can be applied to elements to maximize impact. Once you have laid out a room, that floorplan can be shared so others can view and print. Real Estate agents can subscribe to FloorPlanner Professional and create a custom layout with their Brokerage logo and color scheme. See pricing chart here.
So how can Real Estate agents embrace this tool? Well we see many obvious benefits, starting with staging. FloorPlanner works to scale so you can mock up a living room before lifting the heavy furniture…simply point and click. Does the backyard need work, start with FloorPlanner and show the owners what a difference a few plants make towards improving the backyard. Seeing is believing. Real Estate Investors may use this tool to mock-up floorplan changes they will make if they go forward with a purchase. One thing is for sure, FloorPlanner has made real estate space layout a breeze!
Thanks Go2Web2 for our introduction to FloorPlanner!
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Could Microsoft Surface be the Ultimate Real Estate Technology?

By: Reggie · Posted on June 1, 2007 · 3 Comments

If you visit MyTechOpinon often you’ll know that we stick very closely to our niche—Technology for Real Estate. So when we recently learned of Microsoft’s new “Surface” device, we automatically started thinking how this revolutionary new “coffee table computer” could affect real estate agents. With this device comes a change from the way we have historically done computing through standard keyboard and mouse. Surface allows the users to navigate the computer by figure touch. It has a similar look to the iPhone screen but in a full table computer. Amazing! The unit will wirelessly sync devices, thumb through media, zoom and view photos; the list goes on and on. Since we focus on Real Estate Technology lets take a few guesses at how this could help real estate agents:

  1. Dynamically zoom in and out of neighborhoods using your finger tips to point out neighborhoods and close parks for interested buyers
  2. Video home tours navigated with the touch and drag of a finger. Want to zoom-in and stretch a room to see it in a bigger scale? The consumer will interact with the home.
  3. With Surface integrated into a conference room table, an agent could set their camera on the screen and have their new listing photos effortlessly appear. The real estate agent could stretch and zoom the photos for impact while he/she highlights the properties for fellow agents.

The list goes on and on…how do you think real estate agents will utilize the Surface?

Take a look at this video from Popular Mechanics on the Microsoft Surface: