Download To Your Calendar

Today we added the capability to download a specific open house event to your calendar.  Look for the "Download To Calendar" link in the individual listing view or the add to calendar icon  in the search results view.  Click to download a file in Vcalendar (.ics) format for the associated open house.  A file, upon your approval, will be downloaded to your computer and the calendar program on your computer that is designated to handle .ics files should open the file and process it.  If the file does not open, make sure you have a calendar program (like Outlook or Thunderbird) installed and that it is configured to open and process .ics files.  Another option is to import the .ics file that was downloaded into your calendar program.

Download Directly To Your GPS

A new feature recently added to Google maps will allow you to download individual open house listings direclty to your GPS device.  Here is a brief description of how to use the feature with OpenHomz.com

When you are viewing a single listing (listing view) in OpenHomez.com, click on the "Map and Driving Directions" link under the property address.  This will take you to Google maps with a pin for the address.  In the upper right corner of the page, on the blue bar, click on the Send link.  Yes it looks like it's going to send an email, but wait!!!  

On the left hand side the SEND dialog you can select GPS (or email or car).  The BRAND drop down lets you select your GPS brand including Garmin, Insignia, Pioneer, and TomTom.  If your GPS device is on the brand list and is attached to the computer (or phone ?) you are using you should be able to click the SEND button at the bottom of the dialog and the address will be sent directly to your GPS.

That's it.  If anyone has real world experience with this and would like to share, let us know. We've only tested this in a lab environment, but it seems to work.

Google Base Syndication

Finally!  After a lot of back and forth with Google open houses posted on OpenHomez.com will automatically be published in Google Base.  The feed will be read by Google once per day at about 4AM Pacific time.  Open houses will be posted as Events and Activities in Google Base.  You can find all posting for OpenHomez.com on Google Base here.  

Items posted in Google Base will expire either after the open house or after 14 days, whichever is less.

We know a lot of you have been waiting for this syndication.  Thank you for your patience while we worked through our issues with Google.

Google Gadget

Today we released the first version of our Google Gadget for OpenHomez.com. It looks like this:

The gadget allows iGoogle users to monitor up to 12 upcoming open houses in up to 5 different zip/postal codes. Click HERE to get a copy of the gadget for your own iGoogle page.

RSS Feed Of Open Homes

Today we added RSS feeds to our Open House search results. From the SEARCH RESULTS PAGE you can get an RSS feed for that specific search by clicking on the icon in the SEARCH RESULTS description.

You can add these feeds to most any RSS reader or gadget page that accepts an RSS feed. You can embed this feed in a Web page too. Click here for a free, simple tool to generate the code to embed in a Web page.

Download GPS/Map Data

We have recently added the ability to download GPS/Map data for open house listings. Currently, the only data format provided is KML. KML files can be loaded directly into Google Maps (place the file/url in the search box), Google Earth, and a wide variety of GPS devices and mapping programs.

If the KML format does not meet your needs you might want to consider GPSBabel which can convert from KML to a variety of other GPS/Map data formats.

Look for the map icon next to open houses in a list or after the Map and Driving Directions in the expanded listing view. On the search results screen you can also download a single GPS/Map data file containing all of the listings found by your search.

Happy GPSing.

Google Earth

Recently we added a file suitable for downloading into Google Earth. Sorry, it's too large for Google Maps to handle. The file contains all current and future open house data. You can find the file at http://www.openhomez.com/data/openhomez.kml .

Caution, the file contains a lot of data and may take a long time to load. The file is refreshed nightly at midnight Pacific time.

In the future, look for new mapping functions in My Listings and your Search Results including selected data small enough to load into Google Maps.