Big real-estate listings come with drone footage. A pilot flies over the house, the agent cuts a sweeping video, and buyers get a perfect sense of the street, the views and what's nearby. It looks great, and it usually costs a few hundred dollars or more.
Most people listing on Flathive aren't in that world. They're renting out a spare room, looking for a flatmate for a two-bedroom unit, or letting out a modest house. They don't need cinematic footage. They need an easy, affordable way to show renters where the place is and what's around it.
So we built one, and it's free.
What you get
Every new New Zealand property listing on Flathive now gets an aerial 360° view of its neighbourhood automatically. Nothing to upload, nothing to pay, no drone to book.
It's taken from about 400 m above the area. Renters can drag to look around on the web, or move their phone in the app, just like with a room panorama. They can see:
- The lay of the land: hills, slopes, parks, the harbour, the coast
- Which way things are: where town is, which direction the motorway or the beach lies
- What's nearby: labelled landmarks such as schools, hospitals, supermarkets, suburbs and hills, with how far away each one is
- The approximate area: a soft circle shows roughly where the property sits
It appears in the listing's photo gallery after your own photos. If you'd rather not have it, remove it like any other photo and it won't come back.
Privacy first
The view shows the area, not the front door. The camera and the "approximate area" circle are centred on a point slightly away from the real address, and landmark distances are measured from there too, so nobody can pinpoint the exact property from the image. This is the same privacy-first approach we take with photo blurring across Flathive.
Not Google Street View, and it doesn't need to be
To be upfront: this isn't Google Street View, and it isn't drone footage. Tall buildings and trees can look a little soft, and in some areas the underlying data is a few years old.
But that's not what renters are trying to judge from a neighbourhood view. They want to know where the place is and what's around it: Is it on a hill? Is there a park nearby? How far is the supermarket? Which side of the motorway is it on? For that, the aerial 360° hits the bullseye. Small landlords and flatmates can now show off their location the way big listings do, without the big-listing budget. It's a bit of David versus Goliath.
Made for people who've never been there
Many of the people searching on Flathive are new to the city they're moving to. There are international students arriving for their first semester, backpackers on a working holiday, and people moving from another city or region for a job. They're often choosing a room in a place they have never set foot in.
For them, a suburb name on its own means very little. Is it close to the university? Is it near the city centre or out on the edge? Is that the harbour they've seen in photos? The aerial 360° answers those questions at a glance. Newcomers can get their bearings in a city they've never seen, spot landmarks they only know from pictures and videos, and understand where a room actually sits before they commit to it. We think this is where the feature will be used most.
Built on open New Zealand data: thank you, LINZ
None of this would be possible without Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) and its free, open LINZ Basemaps service. The aerial 360° is built entirely from LINZ data:
- Aerial imagery: high-resolution aerial photography of New Zealand
- LiDAR elevation: 3D surface data that gives roofs, trees and hills their real shape
- Ground elevation: so the terrain sits at the right height
- Topographic place names: the source of every landmark label
LINZ publishes this data under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. That means anyone can build on it, including a small New Zealand company like ours, as long as they credit LINZ. Every aerial view on Flathive carries that credit in the image: "Aerial imagery, LiDAR & place names: LINZ, CC BY 4.0."
Commercial alternatives either cost far more than a free feature could support, or don't allow the images to be stored and reused on a listing. LINZ's open data is what let us offer this to every NZ lister at no cost. We think it's a great example of public data doing real good for everyday people, and we're grateful.
Good tools shouldn't only be for those who can afford them
We believe the public and private sectors should be working together for people on modest budgets and in communities that are too often left out. Expensive technology gives some listings a head start. Everyone else deserves tools that let them present their home in a similar way. It doesn't have to be one-to-one with a drone shoot. It has to be good enough to show the place honestly, market it properly and get it seen, without spending money or wasting time.
The aerial 360° is what that looks like in practice: public data from LINZ and a free feature from Flathive, working together so that a room in a modest flat gets the same chance to be seen as a listing with a marketing budget.
How to get one
- New NZ property listings: nothing to do. The aerial 360° is created automatically a few minutes after you add your address, and appears in your photos.
- Want to regenerate it? On the photos step of your listing there's an option to create it again, which takes about five minutes. You can carry on while it works.
- Don't want it? Remove it from your photos like any other image.
The aerial 360° is available for New Zealand listings for now, because it depends on LINZ's nationwide data. We'd love to bring it to other countries as similar open data becomes available.
List your property on Flathive and see your neighbourhood from above, for free.