Background

For a number of years Miranda Munn, Founder and MD of MJM Marketing Ltd had felt that the commercial property market in the UK was not well served in terms of internet property portals (similar to RightMove for residential property). She felt that there was room for a new portal to be easier to use, more fun to browse properties and much better value.

Why Earthware?

Initially Miranda approached another web developer to design and develop NovaLoca. This developer was aware of the Earthware web-based property mapping solution that was, at that stage, still in development and urged Miranda to consider integrating this into her new website. Miranda quickly saw that this new mapping product would be a cornerstone and USP to her new website would help her achieve her vision for the website so she signed up immediately, whilst it was still in prototype form.

Although Earthware specialises in interactive mapping solutions, our development team also has extensive expertise in web development services. As Miranda’s confidence in us and our abilities grew she invited our sister brand, The Technology Studio, to bid for the whole website build. It was strategically important for us to control the environment for our first property mapping implementation and we were very pleased to win the bid and to team up with Miranda to create the entire website complete with property maps.

What Did We Deliver?

• Interactive property mapping embedded into the NovaLoca website featuring:
  • In map search functionality
  • Full screen maps
  • Bird's eye view
  • Nation-wide Street level views
  • Property information mapping
  • Custom branding to fit into the website style
  • Locality information maps
• Automated daily property loading

To see what we delivered for the NovaLoca website, see the NovaLoca story on The Technology Studio website.

Post Script

Since NovaLoca went live in September 2007, it has been amazingly successful and after two years has over 500 companies, over 1600 agents listing and over 15,000 commercial properties.

NovaLoca is commonly recognised by agents as being the most technically advanced of its peer group, but Miranda is not satisfied with this and is continually striving to work with us to improve the website and the commercial property mapping. In October 2008 we joined forces with Seety to add Street Level View imagery for central London to the property maps on NovaLoca, stealing a march on the mighty Google who did not release their offering in the UK until spring 2009.

Earthware has also formalised a partnership arrangement with NovaLoca for other Earthware products and services to be marketed to UK commercial property agents using the NovaLoca brand. These include both interactive commercial and residential property mapping and 3D property mapping.