On the surface, the site looks great with a number of listings for various real estate agents and portals, however upon closer inspection there are a couple of noticeable omissions from the listings, namely the two gorillas of online real estate,  realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

Patrick Stafford from SmartCompany spoke with former chief executive of REA Group, Simon Baker who views Google Maps as a competitor but not a major threat:

“You have to think about this one logically. For this to shake up the market, for it to have real impact on realestate.com.au or domain.com.au, it has to take away visitors to those sites and therefore leads, and then have agents have to stop using them. Firstly, for consumers or visitors to stop using domain.com.au or realestate.com.au, they’re going to have access to an equal number of listings on Google maps. Currently they’re not there yet.”

According to The Real Estate Marketing Maven, agents, franchises, marketing groups, and listing portals can upload their property listings through Google Base, either a formatted data feed or via the Google Base Data API. Listings are then displayed on a map when a user conducts a search using Google Maps.

Although widely adopted overseas, this is the first implementation of Google Base’s functionality in Australia (that we’re aware of).  Is a local version of Google’s Product Search in the works as well?