There has been been alot written about Google Goggles in the last few days. This is the new visual search feature for android powered mobile phones. It allows you to take a picture of something and get search results based on that image. For instance, you can take a picture of a landmark such as the statue of liberty and get back relevant info about it. Or you could take a picture of a bottle of wine and find out how good that wine was for that particular year. The applications for this new search are endless, and it is still in its infancy.

While there has been no mention of real estate in these early stages, we at Real Estate SEO Pros like to stay ahead of the curve and speculate on where this new technology is likely headed. Flash forward to early 2012. Home buyers are driving around a neighborhood in your local market and stop by a house with a for sale sign out front. Normally, to get relevant info on this house, they would have to find a number on the sign and pick up the phone. Or they could get out their smartphone and punch the address into google maps or zillow. But it’s 2012, and (assuming the world hasn’t ended yet) they know that they can just take a snapshot of the house and search Google with this image. The agent who is listing this house was savvy enough to load all relevant information about this house into Google Maps Real Estate Search. They were also smart enough to load images of the house into Google images with the proper Alt tag information. The result is that they house hunters were able to find all relevant info about that house and found it was exactly what they were looking for. At that time they are prompted to contact you.

It likely will be as normal in a year or two to search visually by your phone as it is to search with a text query now. Real estate is an obvious application for this new search technology. Think of it this way, is it easier to type in a long complicated address into your mobile phone and click through a few screens to find info about a home, or to take a picture of the home and have all that info come up right away? What about the convenience of taking a picture of a picture real estate. Real estate catalogues are still prevalent and many people like to search through homes in this manner even now. By taking a picture of a ral estate listing you could possible find more info about the property than the listing gives you. What happens when google uses it’s street view technology to sell homes with virtual for sale signs? How will that change how people search for real estate? What we may see emerge is a complete virtual real estate platform that allows user to trace the route from their house to the elementary school. In the same search that can god seamlessly from street view into a virtual tour of the house, provided by you, the realtor.

While this technology is likely a ways out for practical real estate use, there are a few things you can do now that can help you gain visibility in the search through images of homes you sell.

1. Take pictures of your properties and submit them to google images. Make sure you take advantage of the alt image tags and input the address, IDX/MLS numbers, and local real estate keywords.
2. Submit your listings to Google Maps through the Google Base product upload.
3. Put the images of your homes up on your site with all relevant alt tags and info from #1. If possible, optimize your title and meta information with addresses, IDX/MLS numbers and local real estate keywords such as neighborhoods.
4. Get listed in the local business results. Google has a local business center here where you can register your business.

Mark my words, Google Goggles technology is a game changer for real estate search. In a few years time, we may be wondering how we lived without visual search. A little further out, expect this same technology to work for video and this will change how we do virtual tours and video tours. Change is the only constant in search and real estate is historically an early adopter of new search technologies, so pay attention to this one.

Aaron Evans
Vice President
Real Estate SEO Pros, Inc