The Open Houses feature will be redesigned in the following weeks.

Organizing an open house day is a great way to attract visitors and potential buyers. If you got any suggestions concerning this tool, now is the moment!

ByTheOwner.com will be integrating in the next days the use of RSS feeds for the diffusion of the ByTheOwner Alerts. The visitors searching for a property will be able, with a single click, to create a RSS feed corresponding to their search criteria, and thus to be the first to know when the house of their dream gets live on the website.

RSS feeds are soooo cool ! But… why?

A RSS feed (Really Simple Syndication), is a XML file which a Web site diffuses in order to spread easily its contents. From the feed’s url, one can daily consult the new contents of the site without being forced to go on the website. Okay… so what? Why wouldn’t you want to go to the website?

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Google added recently the GMarkerManager class to the Google Maps API. This class is used to manage visibility of hundreds of markers on a map, based on the map’s current viewport and zoom level.

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Damn, I just received an email from the Google team telling me that there is a problem with my xml file. Seems like the Bulk Upload program doesn’t accept the canadian currency for our houses prices. Also, we are forced to display a USD price onto our own pages.

I think that I’ll display the USD price with the CAD, but only when a visitor is coming from Google Base. This should be easy to detect using the $_SERVER[”HTTP_REFERER”] variable.

I began this week to test the Google Base beta projet API and bulk upload program.
Google Base is an online database provided by Google into which any user can add almost any type of content. A major component of Google Base is acting like a classified ads service. Some US real estate brokers are already listing their properties in this database and they seem pretty satisfied with the results and visits they get. We figured out that posting the homes for sale from ByTheOwner to Google Base could be a great idea to get additionnal visibility on our clients’ listings.

There a 3 ways to list a home for sale on Google Base.

1. Fill a online form describing the home for sale : Works great, but I definitely wouldn’t want to be the one filling all the forms for the properties on ByTheOwner, eheh
2. Work with the Google Base API, wich is quite simple if you get started with the demo.
3. Bulk upload. You first create a spreadsheet or xml file containing a list of items you want to send to google. Then you upload the file in your Base account and google processes the items in the file.

At first, I started with the API cause I wanted to send the ads to google instantly when the homes were created on ByTheOwner. But the need to get authentified with google everytime made my program very unpleasant to use. I figured out that the best option for me was the bulk upload. So I’m working on a script that will create a xml file containing all the active listings on ByTheOwner every morning. I’ll just have to upload the file to Google Base and Ta-Da!

I sent a first 20 homes batch on friday for testing purpose and it seems to work pretty well. Only problem I see is that the description is incomplete in the search results. I’ll start uploading all of our clients ads as soon as I’ll get this fixed.