Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com
The oldest real estate maxim out there is “Location, Location, Location” but Real Estate 2.0 doesn’t do a very good job of conveying this. Unfortunately, an overhead satellite view of a bunch of listings doesn’t tell you a whole lot about where you’re looking.
One of the trends I noted coming out of the Inman Connect Conference (see Inman Connect Highlights Real Estate 2.0) was the need for greater context in real estate searches and we’ve seen attempts to layer in location specific information into a real estate search already; Shackprices‘ neighborhood tab, Trulia’s heat maps, Yahoo! Real Estate even rolled out a school search function recently. (see A conversation with Michael Yang, General Manager of Yahoo Real Estate)
But none of these have come close to what you can find at Neighborhoodmatch.com
What makes Neighborhoodmatch.com so different from it’s competitors is that it has built a real estate search from the ground up based on what exactly what a consumer is looking for in where they want to live and what kind of lifestyle choices are important to them.
Right out of the gates, Neighborhoodmatch.com asks you to prioritize over a dozen neighborhood characteristics including things like crime rates, schools and income levels, even political views and sexual orientation. This is even before it asks you about the specifics of the home you are looking for.
Once you’ve finished inputing criteria, Neighborhoodmatch.com automatically spits out listings in the neighborhood most appropriate to whichever characteristics you’ve identified. A quick test of my city (Portland, OR) seemed to pretty well on the mark - based on the criteria identified, it pointed me to a pretty appropriate area.
Results are color coded by match (green being best, red being the worst) and displayed on a Google Maps mashup. A cluster of red icons pretty much means you don’t want to live there.
From there you can layer in all kinds of extra data, including school district lines, as well as all kinds of additional places like hospitals, shopping, bars and restaurants etc.
One neat feature is by clicking on the ‘map facts’ buttons, Neighborhoodmatch.com gives you a bullseye icon you can drag around to see overviews of a particular neighborhood. Apparently I live in a neighborhood of ‘Moderate Conventionalists’.
Quite frankly, Neighborhoodmatch.com blew me away with its feature set. One could easily get lost for hours exploring the site. It’s not entirely clear where they’re pulling the listings from; whether they are IDX feeds or if indexed from the Internet, but requesting more information on a property does send you directly to the listing agent’s page.
The interface is a little rough around the edges. The icons are a little Web 1.0ish and the map has some frustrating quirks like re-centering and zooming in whenever you click on it. It’s also very easy to get overwhelmed in all the details. But as a beta product, it’s pretty functional and very useful.
To me it signals a greater emphasis on better meeting the needs and expectations of the online real estate consumer. The rest of Real Estate 2.0 can learn definitely learn something here.
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BYoung | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
It’s a good site which will need to be developed for smaller cities and town. However, some of the questions could be construed as discriminatory and this practice could be also construed as steering to a particular area. They might run into legal problems with the questions that relate to race, ethnicity, sexual preference etc.
Dave | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
I agree with BYoung’s assessment. And not to mention the unhappy buyers that used the site to find their home, only to later find it isn’t what they were lead to believe. Better and less likely to get you sued, is to give the users the information and let them make their own determination on which neighborhood is most appropriate for them.
kdevereaux | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
I enjoy the post, I went to the site and appreciated the input about where I should live. I like Raleigh North Carolina where I currently live it has all of my requirements. Thanks for the heads up on the site! Thanks http://www.trianglereport.com
Incredible Agent | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
I don’t want to be a nay sayer, but I think it’s only a good concept with a decent website. It didn’t really impress me too much, but I’m always willing to give them some time to figure it all out. They definately nailed down the demographics and neighborhood suggestions. I will give them that much.
As far as listings go, It seems as though they’ve scraped the internet for listing data and addresses. Most of the homes I clicked on were already sold or not on the web anymore.
Joel Burslem | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
Incredible Agent, I agree totally with you. I think this site is a great proof of concept. There are some obvious things that I think need to be tightened up; and the design and interface are not brilliant. What I really like is the neighborhood suggestion engine - that’s worth the price of admission alone.
Byoung, I’m not well versed enough with the fair housing act and whether this site could be considered discriminatory. It seems to me that it shouldn’t be a problem. This data is widely available in other places and this site is just aggregating it. But hey, I could be wrong on this one.
Andrew Maury | Jan 24, 2007 | Reply
Interesting site - seems a little like the data seen on Neighboroo but with listings added in. It’ll probably be more useful for people moving to new cities than within their own city.
I had a thought too about steering, but it seems like it should be ok to me since it is just reporting easily accessible data. Maybe others have more thoughts on that?
Kyle Else | May 10, 2007 | Reply
Back in Dec. 06 I found a way for Homebuyers to use the Neighborhoodmatch.com tool for FREE.
http://toursheet.blogspot.com/2006/12/neighborhood-search-engine-for.html