Real estate multimedia developer aussiehome.com has launched a new mapping service six months after signing a deal with UK mapping developer MultiMap.

aussiehome.com holds an exclusive licensing arrangement with MultiMap, which has acquired mapping data for Australia that allows it to map regions across the country for the real estate industry.

The deal is the culmination of four years' work and four separate mapping companies. The map search facility allows the search and display of WA properties on an interactive web map.

Joint founder and director Charlie Gunningham said that every property on the aussiehome.com site was mapped, and allowed site visitors to enter a street, suburb or a post code to display mapped properties in the area.

"We are now closer to our vision of a completely map-based property portal for WA," Mr Gunningham said

"We've always had mapping on our site, but this takes it to a whole other level. Nothing like this has existed in Australia before, and only a handful of sites globally have deployed anything like this degree of mapping technology."

Mr Gunningham said aussiehome.com had employed one of MultiMap's employees to develop Australian data into maps. It works with the majority of Internet browsers, which is a significant development as there had been some browser incompatibility with previous map technologies. The system has been likened to Telstra's http://www.whereis.com.

Launched in 1999, aussiehome.com began with seven real estate agency clients and 70 properties, and about 20 site visitors per day. This has increased to 112 agency clients, mainly in WA, and displays about 4,000 properties that attract up to 5,000 site visitors daily.

Despite low market confidence in dot.com businesses, aussiehome.com has recorded its second profitable year, showing a 40 per cent increase in annual revenues.

Mr Gunningham believes this growth is due to several things, but mainly the successful implementation of online systems, web site development and hosting, and branching out into print media, which now accounts for 25 per cent of the business.

aussiehome.com has developed more than 60 Internet sites for real estate agents in WA, NSW and Victoria, and is now moving into back office management systems and CRM software to allow customers to run their business online.

Using the aussiehome.com system, real estate agency customers can add and update property details and photos online, order products, check hits and enquiries, manage their own clients, print brochures and export maps.

Soucre:Ecommerce Centre case study, Dept of Industry & Resources