Douglas & Gordon
Searching & Filtering Map
customer
Who is Douglas & Gordon?
Douglas & Gordon Ltd is one of the largest independent Real Estate agencies in central London, with over 180 offices covering London and its nearby suburbs. Since it first opened its doors in 1958, D&G has been offering a huge range of services that extend beyond simple sales and letting as well as regular up-to-date feedback on the progress of any property listings.
Challenge
What did Douglas & Gordon want to achieve?
Along with the idea of changing their website in order to gain a better buying experience for their customers, they needed a map in which the potential user could consult the properties locations. Douglas & Gordon decided to deepen its position by upgrading its digital channels. The company embarked on a plan to revamp its website and mobile offering, and create a set of more user-friendly, client-centric services to attract more users coming from the UK and abroad. For that they decided to use Google Maps to enhance the property search feature of the new site.
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We thought about how we could use the website to give customers a better buying experience”
solution
What has been the solution?
To help Douglas & Gordon pull together a digital strategy and deliver quickly, the company reached out to Snowdrop Solutions to help navigate the array of customizable options available for Google Maps.
For the mapping, Snowdrop Solutions created a set of customisable tools, linked to D&G’s own datasets and those of third parties, that form the center of the new design. Specially designed to integrate across all sections of the site, the widget gives customers the ability to enhance their property searches with additional information about the surrounding area and time-based searches to and from the property.
The Snowdrop technical team developed the three following functionalities: Google Geometry API, Google Directions API and Google Drawing API.
With Google Maps Places API the user can look for an exact place and start typing, showing below a list of the closest results related to what the user is searching. Besides, the user could search for “Places of interest”, depending on whether he is interested in living near a park, a certain school, gym and so on.
Google Maps Directions API allows the user to search for a place and then choose any distance and a type of travel, to identify properties inside that range.
Google Maps Drawing API and Google Maps Geometry API let the user draw his area of interest so the properties inside that zone get highlighted in the vertical bar at the right.
testimonial
“Snowdrop really walk the talk. The development team inspired a sense of reliability and trust, while the business team had a lot of knowledge about real estate. They understood why we needed to do things, and suggested ways we could do them better.”
Michael Reed
Digital Consultant
Apis used
Google Maps
Javascript API
Google Maps
Static Maps API
Google Places API
Web Services
