I have done some scraping on my own of some real estate listing websites on my city and applied some filters.
The OP goes much deeper into that idea and I can totally see the need for such a thing. I didn't go much deeper in the idea as I have found something something interesting meanwhile, but this is a need, for sure.
I made a free website called City Filter that aggregates a lot of data from cities around the world and lets you filter them by different criteria including temperature and rain, but also safety, development, population, distance from your location, etc.
If your goal is to identify your favorite cities based on your own criteria, you will definitely like it:
When we were city and house shopping, I kept wanted to be able to query houses for things that the major providers don’t provide query terms for. Even proximity to parks was difficult to discern or searching by walkscore, crime rates, etc, was difficult. Each house has that data, and you can search for some of it visually, but as a developer, you just want to run queries...You seem like the sort of person to crack that code when you do choose a city. I’d be curious if you do (or have) come up with anything :)
That's a nice idea re using an existing place as a starting point. I think some users won't have a clear idea as to exactly what they want so making it easier to "browse" could be helpful.
For the most part extending to the whole country shouldn't be too difficult (famous last words!) -- most of the data sources I'm currently using aren't specific to London. But I think I'll probably first go deep rather than wide, allowing the user to look at areas at a more granular level should they wish to.
Great stuff! I can see a lot of potential with this. I think most of the information you provide for each area are very useful. Love the focus on zipcodes - much better than a city as a whole.
Couple comments: Some of the data/charts are hard to understand right off the bat. I'm not sure it will be clear to everyone what certain scores mean to them. I think it might be useful to take a look at how https://nomadlist.com/ does it.
This is probably obvious to you, but it would be nice to have more tangible and qualitative data for each area. School ranks, violent incidents, etc. are important, but there's so much more that goes into making these decisions! I'm not sure how you'll get this qualitative data unless user-generated, but I think it's critical.
Depth (not just breadth) is very important. E.g. I think people are more likely to use a "here's a complete look at X city" than a "here's a brief look at EVERY city!"
Love what you're doing. Who is your ideal demographic right now? Young families?
Agreed. Or a stylized map (some geolocation magic would be nice) that lets you click in your general area then select the exact city of interest.
The Craigslist city picker is bad, but the paged list is worse.
Keep in mind one of the big Craigslist complaints is the city segregation making it harder for people in areas between a bunch of cities. This is an area to improve on, not to mimic.
Based on firsthand personal experience of doing this sort of research for myself, I am thinking of posting a questionnaire and a price for finding X number of cities or metro areas that fit.
Thank you! Wow, can't believe I've never seen nomadlist. I imagine Search Away would look similar if I could afford hiring a designer.
Agree, qualitative data would be great. Niche has the ability to add reviews but I don't think that's the right approach. I'll have to keep thinking about other ways of getting quality user-generated data. I think it would be really cool if a town official provided a quarterly/annual statement highlighting their area but that might be too time-consuming and expensive to get.
Young families, first-time home buyers and anyone making a move to an area they aren't familiar with.
Awesome, thanks for considering the feedback! Signed up for your mailing list and am excited to see how this develops :)
One quick follow-up for #1, I wonder if a political boundaries layer would be helpful? Like districts for state/federal House, or local government divisions. When I lived in Chicago, being able to filter by ward would've been great. It's only gonna get more confusing as gerrymandering increases :)
Best of luck with the project, and thanks again for taking this on!
Where would one start on something like that? Getting local updated pricing information would seem to be a big missing link. Perhaps crowd sourcing? That would need a critical mass to make it useful. Maybe trying to focus on specific cities first might make it easier.
A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.)
Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's impossible to get detailed enough data for some of this stuff. Noise being the toughest, I'd bet, though maybe you could approximate based on various factors (traffic, etc).
Not the OP, but I've actually made something like that to help people figure out where to live in London based on the criteria they care about -- here it is https://findmyarea.co.uk/?search_type=areas
Would be great to see similar tools for other cities!
Overall, this is really excellent. My town is small but near Silicon Valley, and this does a great job of showing me stuff that's actually near me. Well done!
I imagine it's going to be hard to present information in the same way for large and small towns... Maybe you need some kind of a city/busy/crowded interface to give categories and narrow down, but for a little place without much of interest you just showed paged and ranked like this? Like, "entertainment in Chicago" or "food in Los Angeles" are way too broad a category to present in this format.
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