Jason Hagblom Commercial Real Estate: Use Google Earth for taking pictures of Commercial Buildings

For my first post, I thought I would start out with a tutorial. In my "Useful Tools" links, there is a link for Google Earth. Google Earth is an amazing tool I use every day in my line of work. Today I will show you how to take a picture of a building without ever leaving your office.

Once you have downloaded Google Earth onto your computer, open it up and fly to Salt Lake City. Zoom down and find 900 West and 2610 South. There is a big building on the southwest corner of that intersection. Look across the street and you see another building. The building south of that one is the one we will focus on. It has grass on either side of it. (marked in blue on the picture).

Now, in Google Earth, go to Tools, Options and set your "Show Lat/Long" to Universal Transverse Mercator and hit "Apply" at the bottom. Using our latitude/longitude coordinates, we hover our mouse over the center of the building and we see it is located at 422587/4507382, give or take a few degrees. (I gather the lat/long coordinates on every single building in my database).

Now that we have the correct building, lets quickly grab a picture of it. To your left, you should see the Search, Places, and Layers tabs. Go to the Layers tab and select the Street View option. You should see a bunch of camera icons pop up on the screen. Zoom in a bit and select a camera icon that is in front of the building (there will be coordinates associated with each camera icon; choose the icon that shows 2688 S 900 W). Double click the camera icon and you should fly down into a 360 degree street view photograph. Pan around to your left and you will see the Office Max building (it has a sign out front). Center the building in your screen like you are going to take a picture (I like to get both outside corners in the frame) and on your keyboard hit "Print Screen".

Open up your basic Paint program and hit Ctrl+V to paste the screen shot. Select the dashed rectangle "select" tool at the top next to the dashed star and crop your image so that only the picture is in the selection (you may have to scroll down and to the right a bit to get the full image in screen). Hit Ctrl+X to cut the image, hit Ctrl+N to open up a new window, hit Ctrl+V to paste your cropped photo, and finally go to File, Save As, and save your picture. You should end up with something close to the photo on the right.