Hey guys, what's going on?
It’s Seth here from retipster.com.
I wanted to show you something that I just learned how to do myself today.
And I've actually wondered about how to do this for a long time.
Over the past couple of years, I've noticed on various land listings
and people who are selling vacant lots
pictures like this, like what you see right here,
where there's like, not just parcel lines on the ground, but it's sort of like elevated.
So it looks 3D and it just kind of makes it look a lot clearer.
Exactly how big the property is, the size and dimensions
and where it falls down on the ground.
I always just thought it was a pretty smart way to show parcel lines on the ground
by sort of lifting it off the ground like that.
Here's another example right here.
I actually made this one earlier today
Here is another example.
And really the way that you do this is in Google Earth.
So it's really simple.
I'm right here in Google Earth right now.
So what I'm going to do is zooming on here,
and I'm just going to pick one of these properties here.
And by the way, these parcel lines you see here on Google Earth,
these are coming from a separate software called Parlay 2.0
I have a separate video explaining how that works
and all that stuff.
So feel free to check that out.
I think Parley is very, very helpful for what I'm trying to do here, but it's not vital.
So I'll show you in just a second why it's helpful.
So essentially what we want to do is we want to pick one of these properties.
Let's just pretend that I don't know this right here is our subject property right there.
And we're going to go up here to this polygon tool
and we're just going to title it Test Property.
And we're going to really just trace the lines that are already there.
Now, if you don't want to use Parley, it's about $300 a year for a subscription,
and this is just software that integrates with Google Earth.
If you don't have it, you can always just eyeball this, say for using a parcel map
from the county or from DataTree or AgentPro or whatever,
you can just kind of give it your best guess,
but Parlay just kind of takes it one step further and makes it a lot simpler.
So I'm just going to trace over this.
I'm just clicking down one time, going to the next corner, clicking down again,
go onto the next corner, clicking it again,
and going into the final corner here and clicking it again.
And there we go.
So what we're going to do now is go over here to style and color.
And in this case here, I'm going to click Random.
So it's just going to pick a random color.
You can do that, or you can specify a color.
I think green usually works pretty well just for vacant lots and that kind of thing.
So that's what I'm going to choose here.
Kind of a forest green.
So there's that.
And then also the lines that go around it.
You can select a color for that as well.
That's up to you, if you want to mess around with that
I'm going to pick green for this.
Here we go.
And then what we can do next is go over here to altitude.
And by default, it's going to be clamped to ground.
But what would you can do is choose either
relative to ground or relative to the sea floor or absolute.
I don't think it really matters which one you do.
I'm going to click a relative to ground in this case.
And this thing right here, where it says ground to space.
So you can go ahead and move this around and you'll see,
it will start to raise up that polygon that we just drew.
And if you click on this where it says, extend the sides to ground, there you go.
Now we kind of have that look to it.
So there's that.
And as you can see here, say if we click okay, and we start moving this around.
Actually, I'm going to go ahead and remove the parlay lines.
So we just see the parcel by itself on the middle of nowhere.
So you can see what that looks like relative to everything else around it.
It's pretty helpful.
And something that I think is even more helpful
is if you change the transparency of this thing.
So go ahead and open this back up
right click on this and then Get Info.
Let's see, style and color.
Okay, there we go.
So where it says Opacity, all I got to do is start changing this a little bit.
So this top one is in reference to that light green outline
I've got going on this thing,
but the bottom one is the filled-in portion.
And we can go ahead and bring this down to 50%.
And as soon as I did that, you can see how helpful it is because now we can actually
see through that thing that we just drew on there.
So you can sort of see what the ground looks like beneath it
and kind of see how in this case there's a little bit of a hill or a mountain
within that property itself.
So it's obviously very helpful if we change this even further, we could do that.
We can make it less transparent.
It's up to you, but obviously, if you want to change it, that's how you can do that.
And then once it's done, and once you have that thing drawn, however you want it to be,
it's really nice how you can start using this to take screenshots of it on Google Earth
to using your property listings or your info/spec sheets
that you might be sending out to your cash buyers out there.
So if you're using a Mac, for example,
you could click and hold down, Command-Shift-4
on your keyboard, and that will give you this little cross hairs thing.
You can go ahead and just take a snapshot like that.
And there you go.
And also, I'm not sure if you're aware of this,
I personally was not aware of this years ago
but apparently whenever you take screenshots from Google Earth,
you're supposed to include the Google Earth logo in the lower right corner.
And this information right here at the very bottom,
because that gives credit to the people
or company or whoever got this satellite imagery and who is delivering it.
So if you decide to use screenshots from here you can
just make sure you include that copyright information in there.
I could obviously turn this around and get some different angles
so people can see some other perspectives of it
and where the other mountain ranges are in relation to this property.
And also one more very important thing before I wrap up this video,
once you have this polygon 3D thing drawn,
it's not just about taking the screenshot images.
You can also save this as a file and send it to somebody else
so that all they have to do is click on the file.
And as long as they have Google Earth installed, it will open up Google Earth
and show them this same polygon on their version of Google Earth.
So let's say if you've got a potential buyer or somebody on your buyers list
or somebody who's doing research on the property for you or vice versa,
all you'd have to do to save this is go over here to this thing that you just created
and click save place as and call it whatever you want to call it.
I'm just going to keep it as Test Property.
I'm going to save it to my desktop as a Kmz file.
And so what I'm going to do now is delete this thing that I just created
just to completely get rid of it.
And close out Google Earth and I see this Test Property kmz file that I just created.
I'm going to double click this and it's going to open up Google Earth
and it's just going to automatically take me right to the property.
And there we go.
Pretty cool, huh?
So as long as the person has Google Earth Pro installed,
all they got to do is click that and it'll show up.
Alternatively, they could open up Google Earth and then click and drag that kmz file
over on Google Earth or go over here to open and open it up that way.
But anyway, you get the idea.
So I just wanted to share that with everybody.
I thought it was awesome.
And I had always wondered how these cool little images were made in Google Earth.
I thought there was some third-party software out there, something,
but it's actually really simple if you just know where to go
and right here in the native software.
So thanks for watching.
Good luck.