Via Virtual Earth

You've probably never heard of LoopNet – unless you work in the commercial real estate industry. I hadn’t until last year when they began integrating MapPoint technologies into their products. LoopNet is an application and services provider to hundreds of commercial real estate firms like CB Richard Ellis, Coldwell Banker, and RE/MAX, powering their property queries among other things. Obviously mapping and other location services are critical and integral to their applications. This week they completed and went live with the first set of applications that they migrated to use the Virtual Earth platform. I have a test account that I used to grab the screenshots of their application seen below. One of the slickest and most elegant map search UI’s I’ve ever seen – Sliders let you adjust search parameters like price and square feet in real time while ajax queries are fired to the server to fetch qualifying results. Asynch calls are also used to disambiguate location input as the user enters it. tight! lots of subtle convenience features with an eye on usability tell me this isn’t the first time these folks have done this. I imagine they’ll be integrating Virtual Earth’s Birds Eye view in here soon. Real Estate applications and Birds Eye are like a peanut butter cup together.

Is it a mashup? On the surface it seems to have all the required accoutrements; pimped out web two-ohhh-ified interface, ajax, maps, CSS, data overlays... but on closer inspection it has customers and a business model. not to mention it scored extremely poorly at web validator 2.0. I guess it’s just an application after all ;-)