While I agree that there are better sites for looking at for-sale real estate, Google Maps was by far the best place for finding rentals for our recent move into the city of Chicago from the suburbs. I'll be sad to see it go, until a better apartment search consolidator pops up.
"In part due to low usage, the proliferation of excellent property-search tools on real estate websites, and the infrastructure challenge posed by the impending retirement of the Google Base API (used by listing providers to submit listings),"
Whatever happened to wanting to make all the world's data searchable?
Reasons 2 and 3 are pure cop outs.
Google has a real problem in that they seem to not be able to produce a best-in-breed class of software for highly competitive areas. If somebody came out with better search tomorrow would they just drop it?
Hm, I didn't realize they were also deprecating the Base API in favor of vertical APIs. I suppose they're pulling back from their ambition to create an overarching taxonomy of everything in a single API?
Based on this move I wonder how much truth there ever was to the rumor that Google was considering buying Trulia (http://kara.allthingsd.com/20091218/open-house-google-has-al...). The infrastructure they have is basically the same so they would have encountered the same infrastructure issues with the retirement of Google Base.
It seems like Google is giving up on real estate by dropping the Base API. There is a new shopping API but it doesn't include real estate. I can remember when Base came out six years ago that it was going to "be the death of MLS". Yet now Base is going and we still have little pockets of data only available to Realtors.
The low usage was due to the fact that nobody even knew it was there. I always watch real estate, and only saw these on Google Maps once. (And was instantly enamored, and now it's going away. Sigh.)