When visitors land on your real estate website, they might be very familiar with your market area.  Or, they could be:

• Relocating from out of state
• Trying to find a home in a suburban area with easy access to their big-city job
• Just moving across town to an area they aren’t familiar with

In those situations, you’d really like to give your site visitors a map that shows an overview of your market area.   There are a couple ways to do that.

Custom Maps – UPDATE

Originally,  this post contained a link to a website that prepared very reasonably priced custom maps.  Having visited that site today, I was surprised (and chagrined!) to find a note on their contact page indicating that they are not accepting new clients.  Looking back, it’s true that I spoke with a representative of that firm last year, and they stopped working with new clients at the beginning of this year.

I will keep my eye out for other sources of custom maps.  If you know of one, please include it in a comment on this post and I will update this information.  Until I have a chance to evaluate other alternatives, I’ll leave this custom map area alone for now.

Google Maps

Another alternative became available with the introduction of Google Maps.  Google Maps look, of course, like Google maps.  So, you won’t be getting the upscale look of a custom map.  On the other hand, your visitors can use all the capabilities of Google maps to zoom in and out, obtain directions for traveling between two points, and so forth.

One of our clients serves a market area that contains bedroom communities for large cities such as New York and Philadelphia.  The area is also a place where people look for second homes in the Pocono Mountains.  To assist his website visitors, we created a Google Map that identifies the five towns his site visitors might want to look into for Pocono real estate.  And, as with other Google tools, Google Maps are free!

Providing maps is a great way to give yourself a bit of an edge over the competition.  Do you use maps on your real estate website?  If so, what kind of feedback have you heard from your site visitors?