Google’s Australian division today announced a substantive marketing push to grab users to its real estate services integrated with its Google Maps product, but without the participation of several major online players in the market.

Fully integrated with Google Maps, the real estate search introduces rental or sales listings, and can also manage multi-layered searches for not only property, but also surrounding places of interest such as restaurants and schools. In addition, it can also give real-time views of traffic.

In conglomeration with real estate group LJ Hooker, Google today posted it would dot Sydney with real life versions of the “pins” which point on to locations on its Google Maps platform, which since last year has been overlaying its basic mapping service with real estate data.

At an event in its Pyrmont, Sydney headquarters, Google revealed that it continued to witness strong growth of real estate searches – the numbers of such queries are up nearly 30 per cent year on year between January 2009 and January 2009.

Key partners who have linked their data into Google include Harcourts, the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia, Homehound, MyHome, LJ Hooker, Ray White, First National and Century 21.