How to Put Your Properties on the Map…Literally

As a professional vacation rental manager, you may have fielded this question once or twice: “Where is the property located?” Sound familiar? By embedding a Google map of each property on its respective property listing, you can give your guests exactly what they are looking for. We’ve outlined the steps for doing this below.

Step 1: Go to Google.com  and type in the property’s full address (i.e. 6206 N. Discovery Way, Boise, ID 83713). This should bring up a map.

Step 2: Click on the map. This should pull up a new page.

Step 3: Just under the search bar, to the right of “Get directions” and “My places,” will be a small box with a link icon (see the picture below). Click on that link icon.

Step 4: Clicking on the link icon should bring up two lines of code. To embed this map on your property page, copy the code in the box under “Paste HTML to embed in website.” NOTE: If you want to customize how the map looks, click on “Customize and preview embedded map.”

Step 5: Locate that specific property’s listing on your website. Next you’re going to want to paste the embed code into the html for that listing. This may or may not be a simple process, depending on who does your website. All LiveRez users have control over property listings through an easy-to-use content management system (so, performing this process should be relatively simple). They’ll just need to paste the code to whatever section they want the map to appear.

Now the map should appear on your property listing. From there travelers can then modify the map to fit their needs.

Step 6: You may also want to post a link to the map on Google below the embedded map on your website. To do that, insert this line of code:

<a href="URL" target="blank">View this Map on Google</a>

But before you do that you’ll need to customize this line of code. You’ll want to replace URL with the actual URL of the map. How to you get that URL? Remember where you got the embed code? The box above the embed code should have the full URL you’ll need.

Advanced Users

If you’d like to go above and beyond and give your website visitors a listing of all of your properties, with some additional information at each property point on the map, you should check out BatchGeo.com.