Three years ago, home became the first estate agency in Denmark to offer house-seekers a virtual birds-eye view of all the houses advertised on their website. Now the company has expanded this service.
Today people can fly over anyone's home, whether it's for sale or not. People can also collect photos of their own home from their nearest home estate agent office.
"It’s just like the farmer who has an aerial photo of the family farm on his wall," says Hans Trautner, who is Marketing Manager for home.
"Not only do our clients find our Skyline program really easy to use when they are searching for property; they have fun doing it too. We have record-breaking numbers of visitors to our website week after week," says Hans Trautner. "And we can see this function being used more and more."
No less then 369,000 people visit home's website each week, and with a single click most of them use the Skyline program, where they can fly from place to place in their search for a new home.
Users get a good feel for their preferred area, including information on amenities such as day-care centres, schools and shopping centres and they can really see how these are located in relation to the house.
"The trick is to keep the program simple and be careful not to overdo the options so clients don't get confused. That's why Skyline is such a hit," says Hans Trautner.
COWI distributes the visualisation tools from Skyline Corporation, including TerraExplorer, Skyline's 3D viewer, which allows people to explore a three-dimensional world built entirely on aerial photos.
When a new house is offered for sale the home chain sends the X- and Y-coordinates to an Internet server at COWI, who provide an overnight service, every night, that ensures that the information is available for the users to fly over the house the next day.
COWI is also responsible for updating a nationwide aerial photo databank called Ortofoto. For instance, photos of the largest towns have to be replaced every 18 months because they are soon out of date. The current ones are from 2003, so they will soon be replaced.
"We have to do a lot of processing every time we add new aerial photos, but it will be very easy to use when all the pieces are in place," says Henning Andersen, Senior Project Manager in the Mapping and Geodata Department at COWI.
Henning Andersen hopes that the technology will spread even further to include more estate agency chains in the future.
By Gitte Roe Eriksen, cht@cowi.comPublished: 12.04.2006
Henning Andersen Senior Project ManagerTel.: + 45 63 11 48 73hna@cowi.com