Internet-Based Geographical Information Systems for the Real Estate Marketing

Abstract

In this paper , a user-friendly Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program was developed to manipulate the property listing for sale geographically, to display the property listing in relation to other social and environmental features including topography, ways, types of unit ,ways, gardens and/or shopping centers, and to provide tools for the houses buyers to search and inspect properties and make choices without the need of getting into the houses or without their need to travel to place of houses. This study combines four luminous areas Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Electronic business System, Management Information System (MIS) and Internet and applies the combined technology in the business of real state to make system this system called (GEMI).The first section explains the methodology and prototypes development for Sherouk Beach Resort Planning and Management (SBRPM) with GIS and how the GIS software program was developed. Secondly various application scenarios were provided to test the program developed. It proves that the GIS program developed in this paper provides a good and convenient option in the search of properties based on different selection criteria as concluded in the final sections. Keywords - Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Electronic business, MIS, Real state, GEMI, SBRPM. I. Introduction The following section will address issues that are raised in each of these three stages in the program development. The GIS program was developed in three stages. The first stage is in system planning that is, to identify what functions will be required by the program and how they are to be incorporated into the software program. To do this, first is to become more familiar with the existing functions and tools in MapInfo 7(1) and then to identify what other functions are needed in this System. The second, stage is to design the interface of the software program and to write codes using PHP to integrate the functions required into the MapInfo software program (2). The software program can be applicable to other regions if similar datasets can be used for those regions. In the third stage, the software program developed in this paper is applied to assist in the search of buying units in Sherouk Beach Resort Region (SBRR). By using different search criteria for the search, the software program is tested which demonstrates that the program is capable of assisting in buying in the real estate industry. Through this testing process, limitations of the software program and possible improvement solutions are also explored.