Real Living launches new national website.

Competition is increasing on the national real estate franchise front. Real Living and GMAC Real Estate were both acquired by Brookfield Residential Property Services. The two companies were merged under the Real Living brand. The site was based upon LPS Real Estate Group platform. This is the first national real estate franchise site LPS Real Estate Group has hosted.

W&R Studios has had the pleasure of working with Matt Kaufman at GMAC Real Estate (now Real Living) , Brooks Burton (Real Living) and LPS Real Estate Group on this project. Lots of twists and turns.

Imagine this scenario; you have a huge Canadian corporation buy your company, then buy another real estate company, decide to go national as a single real estate brand. So you merge management teams, sell the new brand to your existing franchisors and hire a vendor and launch a new national real estate portal, all in about 12 months!

Having some experience with national real estate franchise portals I’d like to focus on one thing that’s great about LPS’s platform; Mapping. LPS has spent a lot of resources to ensure that their mapping display a full experience, including plot lines, roof top geo-coding, and bird’s eye views. Here some examples of what I mean.

c21 — Here's a listing displayed on **Century21.com**. The marker is on the wrong home, as you will see in the next example.

Here's the same listing on the new **RealLiving.com**. It includes plot lines and the correct positioning of the marker.

rl be — You can see on the new **RealLiving.com** site the marker in right on the rooftop of the home.

Curiously Century21.com did not offer any birds-eye views of the home.

Now let’s take a look at what happens you when only offer part of the solution. On remax.com they draw plot lines, but lack of rooftop geo-coding which makes the result somewhat comical.

remax plot — As stated **remax.com** has included plot lines. But the marker is still way off.

Remax be — You can see in the above example from **remax.com** without rooftop geo-coding the plot lines almost become a burden.

There are several things that I could call out but the mapping is the most demonstrative. It will be great to see how this site progresses, they are off to a great start!

Congrats to Real Living and LPS Real Estate Group!

Laura Lavecchia

January 25, 2011 at 11:47 am

very interesting to point this out to us
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Stephanie McCarthy

January 26, 2011 at 7:51 am

Mapping is critical in our industry and clearly, Real Living understands this. Yet another reason why we are thrilled to be a part of this franchise.
Rosemary Scardina

January 26, 2011 at 12:42 pm

I am glad to see that LPS has finally been able to get all of Real Livings Franchisee’s site up and active. It took weeks by the local Broker Owner attempting to contact someone and finally getting our MLS partner involved before we could assist them in finally getting their site live.

Congratulations.

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