I am building an apartment rental website and I am implementing a feature that will allows the owners to specify the location of the unit to be rented on Google map.
Part of the process of a adding an apartment for rent in my website, the user has to specify the location of the unit from a dropdown lists (country, city, district) and on Google map. When the user select a country, city, district from the dropdown lists, the map will auto-zoom in to the specified location. For example, it will zoom in to "USA" (country dropdown) then "USA Washington" (city dropdown) then "USA Washington Seattle" (country district) -- this is just an example I acknowledge that Seattle is not a district.
Currently, I have a + sign in the middle of the map and I ask the user to zoom and drag the map to place the + sign on the location of the unit. Something similar to http://en.googlemaps.subgurim.net/ejemplos/ejemplo_600_Controles-extra.aspx. There should not be too much dragging and zooming by the user to place the + on the location of the unit since the map is already zoomed in to the location specified in the dropdown lists. Then I will just retrieve the coordinate of the + sign and store it in my database.
Is there any better and more intuitive ways to do this?
Note: just for your reference here is another possible way https://google-developers.appspot.com/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/marker-animations