A little behind-the-scenes from the workbench. First in a short series on building Map Maker.
Buyers will tell you they’re shopping for a house. Watch what they actually do, though, and they’re shopping for a life — the walk to coffee, the school catchment, whether the gym is on the way home or a guilt-inducing detour. The house is the easy part to photograph. The neighborhood is the part that actually closes the deal, and it’s almost never on the listing page.
So this question comes up, in one form or another, all the time:
“Can we show what’s near the property? Not just a pin on a map — the grocery store, the park, the good taco place. The stuff people actually ask about.”
Simple to ask. And genuinely useful — a proximity map answers the lifestyle question that twenty photos of countertops can’t. The catch is that making one, by hand, for every listing, is a small chore nobody wants. So most agents skip it. We wanted to delete the chore. This post is about why the map matters and how we tried to make building one take about five minutes.
A house is a thing; a neighborhood is a feeling
A listing photo says “here is the kitchen.” A proximity map says “here is your Saturday.” It reframes a property from an object into a location — two blocks from the elementary school, a short walk to the waterfront park, the well-reviewed seafood spot right around the corner. That’s the information a buyer is quietly assembling in their head anyway. Putting it on the page does two things at once: it keeps people on the listing longer, and it makes the agent look like someone who actually knows the area. It’s a credibility tool wearing the costume of a utility.
Here’s the kind of thing it produces — an interactive map a buyer can filter and explore, sitting right on the listing page:
The reason agents don’t already do this
It isn’t that nobody thought of it. It’s that the existing paths are all a little miserable. Static screenshots go stale and can’t be clicked. Embedding a raw Google map drops a generic pin with none of the nearby context. Anything custom means a developer, a ticket, and a week. The idea was never the problem — the friction was. So that’s what we went after.
So we built a five-minute builder
Map Maker is a single page that walks an agent through it, in plain numbered steps:
- Name the map and the property. The featured location is the one pin that’s always visible and never filtered out — the listing itself, with your name or office on it.
- Type an address, get coordinates. Address autocomplete does the geocoding as you type, so nobody’s hunting for latitude and longitude. (And if the lookup ever hiccups, there’s a manual coordinate entry right there — the flow never dead-ends.)
- Add the nearby spots. Grocery, schools, parks, restaurants, the gym — each one categorized so buyers can filter the map to what they care about.
- Style it, then take the code. Pick the look, hit generate, and copy one snippet onto the listing page.
The whole time, a live preview on the right rebuilds the actual map as you type — not a mockup of it, the real thing. What you see in that panel is exactly the artifact you’ll ship. We’re big believers that you should never make someone imagine the result when you can just show it to them.
The part we’re quietly proud of: edit your map by editing a spreadsheet
Here’s the design decision that makes the rest work. Every map is backed by an ordinary Google Sheet. Each nearby place is a row — name, address, category, a one-line description. The live map reads that sheet, so the agent’s map is editable forever, by anyone, without ever touching the embed code again.
New cafe opened across the street? Add a row. A spot closed? Flip a column to hide its pin — no deleting, no rebuilding, and you can flip it back next season. It means the map on a listing page doesn’t rot the way a screenshot does. The honest engineering reason we did it this way is that a spreadsheet is a database an agent already knows how to use. The fancy version of that sentence is “no-database content management.” The real version is “we didn’t want to teach anyone anything.”
Try it
The fastest way to get it is to poke at the live example — click the pins, filter by category, scroll the cards.
👉 Live demo: map-maker.virtualresults.com/demo · Build your own: map-maker.virtualresults.com
In the next two posts I’ll get into the parts that were harder than they look: shipping code that runs on someone else’s website without becoming a security liability, and the small, opinionated design system that makes a free utility feel like something worth trusting.
If you’d like a proximity map on your listings — or you have a sharper idea for how it should work — tell us about it. We like these conversations.
Next in the series: When your users paste your code into their own site.