ZagGoo

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ZagGoo Every holiday season I wonder how many copies of the New York Zagat dining guide I will receive from service firms and friends who yearn to help me find the best places to dine. Alas for paper, and for my gift-giving friends, I now use Yelp, Dragon Go, Around Me and a host of other mobile apps that support my hunt, real time, for the best veal parmigiana as I stroll through Little Italy. Google recently acquired Zagat and is ready to launch Google Local Plus, a site that will incorporate the full array of Zagat information and ratings. It’s not surprising that Google made this move because 20% of all searches on Google are for nearby information — and 40% for those using mobile phones! Google contends that it will continue to print the Zagat guidebooks, but it’s only a matter of time before the books go the way of Kodachrome film and the travel agent. All of this made me think about how the real estate business is going to increasingly become “app’d.” Imagine: Apartment hunters will walk the streets with the Apartment Source App and will be able to view available apartment lists, will have access to hundreds of reviews by tenants and neighbors who tell it like it is – crummy landlords, bedbugs, dirty lobbies, rusty pipes – along with real-time price grids to help renters decide to move on to the next offering. Beware commercial office brokers – the Office Source App will soon follow.