Realtor.com Dives Deep into Neighborhoods

I’ve had a few days to play around with Realtor.com’s new Neighborhood tool and I like a lot of what I see so far. But I’ll get the obvious criticisms out of the way first; it really, really doesn’t play very well yet with Firefox in OSX (or at all in Safari) – there are quite a few formatting errors – and, it’s not live in Portland yet. Both of these I’ll forgive (for now) given its Alpha status.

Somewhat reluctantly then, I confined my research to this post to Seattle Neighborhoods as it is the city I am most familiar with, after Portland.

Starting on the homepage, clicking on a the map reveals basic information of the neighborhood you’re looking at (this was flaky in Firefox) in a pop-up dialog. Basic info is presented and the outlines of the neighborhoods are mapped down to the street level. If your own neighborhood is missing, you can even draw it in yourself using the site’s WikiHoods feature.

In order to begin to research a new neighborhood, the site gives you a number of sliders to adjust to your preferences.

And while the sliders were a neat way to refine a search – moving them along their axis line automatically refreshed the neighborhood list above it – nothing happened on the map however. It would have been nice if the appropriate neighborhood outlines were displayed. This very well could have been a bug or browser issue though.

While neat, I left feeling that perhaps the data points the sliders were asking me to refine were just a bit too nebulous. Family friendly? Hip Factor? Where exactly do these ratings come from and what do they mean? Moreover, can my desires for either even be accurately conveyed through a slider?

Overall, I’m also not sure Realtor.com has totally nailed the top level of this site and ultimately, figured out who will be using it. Is for out-of-town or cross-town relocations? People already in a neighborhood?

If it’s the former, it seems to me there’s a little more hand-holding necessary at the top level before you can dive down in to the neighborhood level – right now the site presumes too much local knowledge on the neighborhoods themselves. And sliders don’t cut it for honing in my search. If I’m thinking of moving, I need to figure out where is best for me to go. Right now, it’s not entirely clear how I’m supposed to get there.

Heat maps might help me figure out what areas are hot or not. Maybe a quick demographic survey to better identify who I am and what kind of needs I have. Neighborhoodmatch.com did this very well (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) – I say ‘did’ because the site seems to be dead now.

Diving down into the neighborhoods – the site gets much better though. It kicks off with a summary description from Wikipedia and a photo feed from Flickr, as well a “Giga-Pixel” HD image. I did really like the Weather tab however – with its information on pollution levels and natural disasters – what fun!

Frankly though, most of this I’d lump into the ‘nice-to-know’ category and sling it all down at the bottom of the page. The HD photo especially is gimmicky and not terribly useful – though I did manage to peer into this person’s apartment using it.

The Learn section is much more valuable – there’s some really great data here including listings, housing data and school and crime info. All are nicely presented and you really could spend hours cruising through all of it.

The Maps are also another nice touch – you can really get a good sense of what’s happening in the area. This is what really is needed at the top level – it’s too bad you have to dig down into the individual neighborhoods before you can find all the good stuff.

One thing I did find of kind of eerie and that was an overall sense of deja vu; and maybe it was just because I was looking at properties in Washington State, but the more I played with Neighborhoods the more it began to remind me of Estately.com – though Estately somehow manages to make all of the information fit together much more elegantly.

That said, Realtor.com’s Neighborhoods is actually a great site that’s really just struggling to find its legs in Alpha right now. Underneath it has some very rich data and some good functionality. Give it a little time to mature and work out some of the kinks and I think it could become a very popular tool.

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