Marc Davison envisions an ideal system for real estate searches – wouldn’t this be grand? He imagines “a Pandora for real estate. A system that allowed users to tailor a search by liking and disliking the listing results the system provides them based on their broad parameters. By crunching our responses along with those collected by all who came before us, search could be considerably more productive.”

The nuances of how this could be created are not lost on me. But if Amazon can do it with books and Pandora can do it with songs, I’m convinced real estate could do it with listings. Especially if we could find a way to suck in the user generated content – the things people are thinking, tweeting and facebooking about properties. Yes, a legal minefield – but one we should attempt to sweep.

What would you like to see in a real estate search engine?

I’ve added a link under “Tools” to “Calculate a Property’s Walk Score.” The link is to Walk Score, a site where you can enter a property address and calculate its “walkability.” From the site’s “how it works” page:

Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. Walk Score measures how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle—not how pretty the area is for walking.

The Walk Score calculator produces a Google map while it’s creating the score, and that map’s mashed up with businesses, services, schools etc. in the area. In the example below, you can see that the White House is in a very walkable neighborhood:

Google Maps has added a “real estate” search option. Enter an address and select that option, and you get a list of properties in the area pulled from various sites (not Multiple Listing Service data). Click on a specific property, and you get an option to see details (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, price, and property type), photos and videos, and web page links. After you one or more properties that are appealing, contact me, and I’ll arrange for you to see ‘em!

More information at the Google Operating System blog.