Digital maps have been costly to implement and maintain.  Low cost GIS toolkits provide basic map drawing capabilities, but lack links to real estate applications, and lack the tools for more sophisticated real estate analysis.

You can look forward to adding maps with more intelligence to your applications: cost effective maps that are real estate aware and can tell your application more about a property in relation to other properties or features on the map.

Map Solutions of Menlo Park, CA, a value added reseller of Tele Atlas digital maps, has announced the release of the MapDirector Toolkit ($795).  MapDirector is a high-level, easy to implement interface and scripting language for the GeoLocator runtime module.  The runtime module includes links to MLS, dBase, and comma delimited ASCII data sources, links to popular appraisal forms software, and tools for preparing CMA or appraisal location maps.

Integral to this new intelligence is the ability to generate relational geographic queries which provides information back to your application about the context of a given property.   For example, MapDirector can provide the answers to the following questions: "how far is this comparable to the subject property?", "what census tract is the property in?", or "what FEMA flood panel and zone is the property in?".

MapDirector also enables the use of geographic selectors as a factor in database queries.  For example: "what do the demographics look like within a 1 mile radius?".  Accurate real estate analysis also demands a more sophisticated geographic selector, so MapDirector can also select properties within a user defined Farm surrounding an irregularly shaped neighborhood.

Map Solutions licenses two versions of the GeoLocator runtime.  GeoLocator/Agent ($159 MSRP) does not require a CD-ROM to run after the maps have been installed, comes with two installs, and includes one County map.  Multi-county Metro Area maps are included in the full-featured GeoLocator/Pro version ($295 MSRP). Cost effective network and enterprise licenses are also available.

Also available, for server side applications development, is the Enterprise Map Server ($1495 MSRP) which, together with the MapDirector Toolkit, can be used to deliver map images on demand or in batch, perform geographic based queries against comparables databases, and automatically generate geographic queries on demand or in batch.