Back in November the Google Vans were seen running around some of our capital cities photographing the streets to provide a 360 degree panoramic view right down at the street level.  Today Google Street View goes live in Australia but what everyone assumed at the time was that like the US, we would only have the large capital cities on Street View.  Newspapers are reporting that Google’s goal is to map virtually all streets in Australia including smaller and possibly even major highways.

For the next week we will be no doubt be bombarded with comments in the media about privacy concerns the same as when Google Maps was initially released but it will not take long to die down.

Personally I have found that up till now mapping has not been as a bigger impact with real estate online as thought it was going to be but Street View has the potential to become huge. Street View will allow buyers to really narrow down the field when looking for homes when used on top of the substantial number of internal photos already on most listings.

What a fantastic tool for our industry and there are dozens of way an agent can use this. The race will be on between portals and networks to integrate this feature into their websites.

Editor Note: Domain had this up and running yesterday

Google has just announced that it will be bringing its ” Street View” images to Australia with images captured over the next several months and become available for viewing later this year.

Google Street View is an added feature of their highly popular Google Maps that provides 360° panoramic views of the street at ground level. It was launched in May this year in the US for a limited number of cities which has been slowly expanded.

(more…)