For many years the Google Maps API never required any form of credit cards or payment arrangements, but that changed not to long ago.

With the New requirement to put up a Credit Card it made things A-LOT-MORE complicated for “non-techy” website owners that need to Geocode a lot of addresses for their real estate websites. Instead of just know that you would get x-number of geocodes done per 24 hrs (2500) was great! – but – no more.

Now you have to enter daily quotas so that you do not exceed your free monthly “pre-credit” of $200 dollars. Not only that but every single thing has been broken down to a per api parse such as “did customer use your drag and drop on your maps and then use street view and “places” etc etc. All to the point where managing your own RE websites for average agents trying to do a DIY Real Estate Solution has become even harder for newbies.

We have just completed a new “How-to-gecode” video to walk you through all of the needed steps of both Setting Up Your Google Maps API – to How to Geocode with RETS PRO’s Geocode Module. Be sure to check both of those links to get you guys through all of the How-To’s without getting hammered by huge Google Maps bill for not paying attention.

To make things even easier for our customers we’re adding in a new “max-limit” setting to prevent the cron from running any more than what you set. Hopefully this should save everyone a ton of time and possibly some “oops” money.

And in case you’re reading this and wondering what we recommend setting the geocode limit/quota to?
Well if your Google pre-credit = $200 and then their monthly calculations says that = to 40,000 geocoded Per-Month.

Divide that by 30 and you will get 1,333.33 per-day.  Since you would typically never have more than a few hundred to maybe just over 1000 new listings being added to your RETS feed in a 24-hr period – but you need to also get all of the rest of the listings geocoded due to this maybe being a “new-install” then we would recommend going with setting limit/quota to a maximum of “1200” per day via your cron job.

The good news though for those that are located in the USA because you can pre-run the free Tiger geocode service with our solution and it will geocode approximately 75-85% of all the listings – only minor note though, the pins are placed on the side of the street instead of like google does it where it’s located over the center of the actual building/lot – but its thousands of “free” geocodes that are going to be on your site “today”. Then we typically switch right over to google and then let it run its daily limit for the rest of the 15-25% of listings that were not coded by Tiger.

Cheers –
RETS PRO.