Darby Sieben -

My last post taked about Weather and Local Search and how we completed an integration with The Weather Network and Yellow Pages Group. If you are interested in integrating local search powered by YellowPages.ca in your Canadian property; at the bottom of this post I have connection points – I would be happy to discuss options with you.

For this post I wanted to focus on a couple of integrations on Real Estate websites and Local Search. Both of these categories are completely complimentary and when you combine local search to a real estate offering you provide a more complete user experience.

Integration Example #1 – HomeTrader.ca

About Home Trader (from their website) – homeTRADER.ca – Canada’s Real Estate Search Engine – It’s a one-stop destination with listings and information on homes for sales, apartments for rent, house rentals, condos for sale across Canada.

Here is a quick walking tour of their site:

Home Page (from the home page, it will default you to your IP location, or you can simply enter your location – here is an example of Toronto)

From the home page I selected downtown Toronto and as you can see it will plot all the locations that are available:

When you click on a particular location it will provide you with pop-up summary of the location and give you the option to find more details on the property. I decided to click on a rental property on Nelson Street.

Once you click on the property that you are interesting in finding more details, you have the option of plotting around you some popular local categories (powered by YellowPages.ca). I clicked on a bank icon to see what banks are around this particular location:

The following popular categories you can find around any location on homeTrader.ca – Grocers, Shopping Centres, Schools, Churches, Restaurants, Gas Stations, Clinics, Childcare and Banks.

These are all extremely popular urban market categories that anybody is looking for when moving to a new location in a city. Since each category is toggle on/off makes it very easy for any user to find exactly what is important to them.

Integration Example #2 – ByTheOwner.ca and DuProPrio.com

About ByTheOwner – from their website – Our mission is to give consumers a complete real estate service through the Internet so they can sell, buy or rent a property privately, without an agent and with no commission. Together, ByTheOwner and its French counterpart DuProprio constitute the largest and most visited For Sale By Owner network in Canada.

Home Page – starting with the home page you are presented with a number of hot properties that are available as well as a number of search functions.

If you select a property – you end up going to the properties detail page. On the detail page you are presented with all the details on the property.

Notice at the bottom of the property you are presented with a local search area (powered by YellowPages.ca) that gives a potential new home owner with access to popular search categories and the ability to conduct a local search.

One very nice feature with this implementation is that all the one-click categories are pre-populated based on the location of the address in which you are looking at. The user does not have to think about whether the search is locally relevant or not, all searches are automatically targeted to the properties location – very cool.

From the example above on homeTrader.ca, which is more targeted towards condos, apartments and rentals on ByTheOwner, the categories are move geared towards home owners. Categories such as; Insurance, Banks, Loans, Mortgages, Inspections, Appraisers, Movers, Storage, Lawyers, Building Contractors

This integration is also part of DuProPrio.com, the french language counterpart to the ByTheOwner.com.

So what do you think about the following integrations – is this something that is useful for end users? If you are interested in integrating Canadian local search, powered by YellowPages.ca, in your properties, please feel free to contact me via my LinkedIn.com profile or my Twitter account and I will provide you with my work email address and one of my business development team will connect with you regarding integration options.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Released over this past weekend was a very cool blackberry application from Yellow Pages Group. The application can be downloaded directly to your blackberry at InstallYP.ca/Blackberry (http://installyp.ca/blackberry) – please note that this link is blackberry specific, if you try to access through a web browser it will tell you that your devise is not supported.

This application features the leading directory services in Canada, YellowPages - for finding a business, Canada411 for finding a person, and a blended Reverse Lookup for finding both people and businesses.

Compatible with the newest blackberries and backward compatible to previous generations, this application automatically detects your device and installs the features that are compatible. For example, GPS search is enabled on devices with GPS, non GPS blackberries won’t see this option.

Lastly, the application auto detects your language settings and is available in French and English – pretty cool stuff.

Some of the high-level features include:

- tab between Business, People and Reverse Lookup
- save listing information through MyFavs or directly to your blackberry address book or both
- people search with integrated find businesses nearby (surprise your date with flowers on the way)
- GPS search (for devices where this is enabled)
- direct connect to Voice Search (no charge usage) if you are on the go

Application is completely free to download and overall is pretty cool and puts the most up to date Business and People information in Canada at your fingertips.

If you are interested, check out other neat local Canadian search applications.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Video is definately making its mark in Canada with a number of local search sites launching video products. Companies such as Yellow Pages Group on YellowPages.ca, GoldBook, Canpages all have video products available to their customers.

Of particular note in this post is the ability to embed these videos into 3rd party websites. For end customers this is a great way to leverage the video service on their own websites to generate a richer experience for customers who might type their URL directly. This service is available on YellowPages.ca. Under any video you can select “embed”, grab the code and place it on your website.

Here are some examples of local business video ads (embedded from YellowPages.ca):

Harley-Davidson Motorcycles Of Edmonton (1980) Ltd

Moto Prestige Cycle

Skintastic Laser & Cosmetic Clinic

Popularity: 42% [?]