The real estate industry has a long history with Layar. In 2009 when Layar began with geo-located layers, Funda, the Dutch real estate search engine, was one of the first and most popular layers on our platform. Today, individual agencies like 4one4 in Australia are using interactive print to provide relevant information about properties to their customers.

Interactive print goes far beyond the pages of magazines, pamphlets or business cards, and Van Santvoort, a real estate agency here in the Netherlands, is showing just what that can mean. At the recent Regionale Nieuwbouwbeurs real estate exhibition, the Van Santvoort stand featured walls full of digital interactivity built by Layar partner Limebizz.

Visitors to the Van Santvoort booth could scan the images and descriptions of real estate properties to view extra photos. Users could swipe through photos in and around the properties as well as view floorplans. Videos offered booth visitors with tours of properties, and a 360º interactive “walkthrough” really made them feel like they were there!

This project is a clear leg-up for Van Santvoort over the competition. Instead of a single picture and description, Van Santvoort could provide multiple pictures, videos and even 360º experiences at an in-person exhibition, instead of online where these experiences traditionally live. Bringing the digital to the real life really made the difference for Van Santvoort.

Earlier this week, Layar invaded Canada with our Activate Print seminar in Toronto. Attendees took to Twitter to express their excitement about the Layar Creator. Check out the reactions below!

Depending on where you live, if you’ve ever wanted to hear from the founders of Layar up close and in person, this week is a good chance to do just that! This week, both Maarten Lens-FitzGerald and Raimo van der Klein will be speaking at events in both Europe and North America.

Tuesday and Wednesday this week is the third annual Augmented Reality Event in Santa Clara, California. Maarten will be making his third appearance at the event, and will be presenting in the business track about the augmented reality market.

Maarten’s talk, dubbed “Where the Money Is,” will be an overview of lessons learned by Layar as we strive to make our technology ubiquitous, secure a strong hold in existing revenue streams and make money for ourselves.

“It is about what lies beyond today’s AR with geolocation, games, 3D campaigns, animation, etc.,” says Maarten about his talk.

You’ll also be able to watch a demo of a new product coming soon from Layar which aims to achieve these goals. The talk is at 10am on Tuesday, May 8th at ARE2012 at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

As for Raimo, he’ll be much closer to home at Mobile Convention Amsterdam (MCA). After a highly successful sequel event last year with over 800 visitors, MCA is back again for the third time to bring together the best and brightest in the mobile world in Northern Europe.

On Tuesday, May 8th, Raimo will be speaking with Anita de Beijl, marketing manager for Sanoma Media’s vtwonen. You may remember our project with vtwonen not long ago in which they used Layar to enhance the pages of their magalogue with extra content and direct buy buttons.

Anita and Raimo will discuss the process of partnering up to create this project and the results of the experiment. You can see the discussion live tomorrow at 12:45pm in the Media & Publishing track at MCA.