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).
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.
This kind of tool would be absolutely brilliant as part of Zillow.
I'd love to see various distances from properties assuming bike, or walking, or driving, etc.
Everyone who lives in a neighborhood knows these things, but it's really hard to figure it out before without traveling there and attempting some things.
I've been looking for land for a while, and often thought of making a tool will let you input the normal filters for property search, but include things like distance/time to specific locations (Library, Grocery, Home Depot, Costco, etc.), as well as to major freeways. Other ideas including giving ratings based on terrain, flood plains, etc.
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 :)
The University of Minnesota, Center for Transportation Studies, Accessibility Observatory has been working on such tools to provide a connection between studies and analysis and applicable geospatial visualizations (i.e. noise pollution, access to jobs within 30 minutes, access to food, etc.).
I'm surprised there isn't more of this already published and well known, such that you can go on Zillow and see such things.
Pure speculation, but perhaps this would only detract from more sales and revenue-generating turnover?
Doesn't Zillow have a similar tool to filter for properties within a given commute? You type in your work address and, say, 45 minute commute, and it redraws the bounds. Pretty cool tool.
I'd adore a Google Earth overlay that showed rentals and/or homes for sale (preferably grabbed according to my own criteria) so that I can use things like drive time to important locations, school boundaries, etc. to find places I'd like to live.
The mapping that existing real estate and rental listing sites use are frustrating to me because searching by location is clunky -- by city or zip code or even distance as the bird flies is too vague. I want to make sure I don't spend my life commuting, that going to our dojo isn't a prohibitively long trip, that I like the school my child would be in, and that there's a nearby grocery store or grocery delivery that suits my dietary restrictions.
I want to be able to overlay whatever data is important to me -- elementary school boundaries, grocery stores or delivery areas, traffic patterns, etc -- on my home search.
I want to be able to pick a few locations and specify maximum drive times for each, then find places in the overlap (bonus points if I can input my schedule so typical traffic patterns are considered).
I have no idea how you'd make money off of it, though. :/
I'd love to have such a feature in RightMove or Zillow, to be able to search properties within say 30 minutes drive from work, instead of just faffing around in Google maps trying to guesstimate.
It seems like there are some primary constraints people look for when searching for a property (E.g. 1% rule, city population size, ect.) , are there any algorithms scaping data to streamline this process? I find it hard to believe people are doing this manually LOL! If not, if anyone is interested in sharing the cost, I will build one for personal use using Zillow's API. I want something that will scrape select US cities and return homes as the popup on Zillow meeting my criteria.
The sooner this gets rolled out as a standard Google Maps feature the better. I fully expect that property prices would change quite significantly if this data was easily Googleable. Then we might see some serious efforts to tidy up air quality.
The thing with air quality is that if it is consistently bad and you live in a city then you have no idea what clean air 'tastes' like. There are lots of people living in cities who have youth on their side and have no idea what they are really breathing.
Nice idea. I'd like to see something applicable for other cities (via openstreetmap?) to explore possible partially remote areas where I could be living; along with the possibility to hook it up with more data.
Background: pretty bad case of asthma, car exhausts being one thing that makes things worse.
When we were looking for our first house we got a flyer about a service that would help us choose the best location that fit with our "lifestyle and personal" preferences. Once of those was to look at which neighborhoods were liberal and which were conservative, and give us an idea of the kind of neighbors we would have. Quite useful, though we never used the service, as granular data continues to be collected and stored I wonder if we'll see people more and more choosing neighborhoods based on the quality of their neighbors.
I definitely hear you - this is actually just an idea I had last night and just wanted to get some data. The response has really been pretty decent (I've got about 150 pieces of usable data).
My next step is to figure out exactly how to use the data. I will likely start with neighborhood pages, and move on to individual building pages once the data gets dense enough.
But I would love to hear your thoughts on product ideas - what info would you like to see? What comparisons/analytics on the data you know I have?
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!
I work in online real estate, and this is exactly the kind of thing we love to do when it comes to utilizing data. How can we take X, Y and Z data points and generate something useful? Taking into account crime reports, graffiti reports, available parking spaces, etc, can all help you decide whether this place is good or not. The requirements here are kinda strange (proximity to a grocery store? not crime rates or anything like that?), but to each his own, I suppose. I'm really impressed with the resourcefulness of the author, though. I think I would probably just go to Zillow or Trulia and see what they say...
It would be interesting if you could hook up with a site like redfin or whatnot to embed that on their site so when you are looking at a house it automatically fills in all the data it knows about.
I feel like I can get much of that information just by searching maps and inferring qualities of communities by the proximity and quality of amenities nearby. At least I thought it was pretty accurate during my home search.
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).
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