A Bountiful Booty of Neighborhood Boundaries
Developers looking for new ways to mashup data on a neighborhood level (two of my current favorite applications are Walk Score and Drive Score) have a couple new options this week.
First, Urban Mapping released its free Neighborhood boundary API and now Zillow has followed suit, releasing over 7000 individual boundary files.
What’s in it for Zillow? Well, it’s a perfect example of crowdsourcing their development. Zillow hopes the folks that use the definitions can in turn refine them and then pitch them back into the mix.
From ZillowBlog:
We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.
Makes perfect sense - especially since their neighborhood definitions (at least where I live) are not exactly perfect (see Zillow Launches New Smart Search Feature).
Nevertheless, kudos to both for releasing this kind of valuable geo-data to the wild. It’s way above my head, but I’m sure someone out there will have some ideas on how to use it.
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Bert Sperling | Jan 17, 2008 | Reply
Kudos to both Urban Mapping and Zillow for sharing.
Zillow’s offering is the most compelling, from a development standpoint.
Zillow is offering a complete set of their neighborhood shapefiles, while the Urban Mapping API keeps the data firmly in their control.
The difference may be thought of like this -
with the complete dataset (Zillow’s), it’s like someone saying ‘here’s everything I know.” The Urban Mapping API is like, “Ask me a specific question, and I’ll give you a specific answer.”
From Zillow’s shapefiles, mapping experts can define the specific shapes of the neighborhoods, which Urban Mapping isn’t sharing in their API.
This makes sense, because this is Urban Mapping key expertise and they wouldn’t want to give away the farm. Zillow’s business lies elsewhere (a matter of some debate.)
From a quick look, I would say that Urban Mapping has better coverage of neighborhoods than Zillow’s, though Urban’s quality control seems somewhat lacking.
For example, according to their API, Portland zipcode 97214 stretches from the northwest downtown (Chinatown) to the southeast. And they misspell “Ladds Addition” as “Lads Edition.”
But both these offerings are for the casual user or developer. Serious web sites with serious dollars at stake will already be acquiring or developing neighborhood content inhouse.
Best, Bert
Who the Ef Cares | Jan 17, 2008 | Reply
Quite honestly, who cares? It is very easy to see why Zillow is trailing market leaders Trulia and Realtor.com. What developer is going to waste their time creating an application on “boundry files”? Will potential home buyers go on the web to look for a potential mashup like this? Highly doubt it. As a matter of fact, has any developer created a multi-million dollar site with Zillow APIs? Zillow clearly needs to re-think their business strategy and stop wasting people’s time with the worthless announcements (ie last week’s announcement of Z dropping “beta” from the logo—yawn). If they don’t come out with some breakout technology soon, they will always trail realtor.com and trulia.com.
Pru Hawaii | Jan 17, 2008 | Reply
Looks like it could be useful, especially in Hawaii too. People have many different definitions of neighborhood boundaries here. User generated neighborhood geocoding would be interesting.
Andrew | Jan 17, 2008 | Reply
User generate neighborhood geocoding would fix some of our issues in Hawaii. Many people have different definitions of neighborhood boundaries. Any examples yet of how other people have used the APIs?
Spencer | Jan 18, 2008 | Reply
@Who the Ef Cares:
Last week’s announcement wasn’t really about removing the beta. It was about:
- building an entirely new algorithm for valuing almost every home in America, a new algorithm which is 12% more accurate nationally and 18-28% more accurate in key cities like LA, San Francisco and Atlanta.
- for the first time, the 16 million property attributes that have been contributed by our Community are now factored into the Zestimate
- we now have 67 million Zestimates (vs the 40 million that we launched with 2 years ago in beta
- we now have data on 90 million homes (vs the 60 million homes we had data on when we beta launched 2 years ago)
The beta thing was the cherry on top.
Last week’s news was not a yawner.
Here’s the press release: http://zillow.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=press_releases&item=48
Thomas Johnson | Jan 18, 2008 | Reply
Joel, You post caused me to have a thought about how Web 2.0 can affect local economic development.
http://agent21.featuredblog.com/?p=9
It seems that every time taxpayer funded “Economic Developers” send out a press release it is to announce how much tax abatement they have given in exchange for some business activity. The most egregious offense in my mind is taxpayer funded play pens for millionaires otherwise known as professional sports stadiums (sorry sports fans).
If every community would make an effort to ensure that their community was correctly represented on the web, it would probably be cheaper to put staff to work on web presence rather than bribing business with tax abatements. If people want to live in your town, business will follow.
Darrin Clement - neighborhood boundaries | Jan 22, 2008 | Reply
Hi Bert - interesting thought, that companies might want to develop these in house. There are some reasons you might not want to . If you do, Maponics will pay you for your work:
http://www.maponics.com/Neighborhood_Trade_In/neighborhood_trade_in.html