Comments on: Neighborhood Search Comes Back

By: Shawna | iShop Greenwood Indiana Real Estate

Shawna | iShop Greenwood Indiana Real Estate — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:04:03 +0000

Hey There, it’s great to see people writing about neighborhood blogging. I have really been wanting to put some great neighborhood links on my site but am just getting overwhelmed and haven’t been able to get started. Any suggestions???

By: Brandon Property Management

Brandon Property Management — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:12:42 +0000

I think because most real estate sites provide so much neighborhood info already is the reason you have seen these sites not as prevalent. I guess these sites seem to getting beter and even more information. I will have to check into them. Thanks for the info.

By: Real Estate Marketing Links « Robincbw’s Weblog

Real Estate Marketing Links « Robincbw’s Weblog — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 16:51:43 +0000

[...] Neighborhood Search Comes Back [...]

By: Travis | Neighboroo

Travis | Neighboroo — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 23:02:44 +0000

Hi Joel. Boo! It’s the ghost of Neighboroo.

I just wanted to chime in my two cents after my experience in creating a neighborhood search service. We started as a market research firm selling data, so naturally our consumer website was very number crunchy. It started as an experiment that lead our small team into real estate marketing. One of the original strategies is similar to city-data.com where interesting figures would lead to discussions, great fodder for SEO, which would produce leads for agents. However, getting this virtuous engine going was quite challenging without the agents’ involvement.

I suggest neighborhood search websites or features within sites to engage local agents (which some do). It’s the most useful given that abstracting a neighborhoods’ qualities without overwhelming the user or oversimplifying it is a tough task to master.

I like the tools out there for neighborhood browsing, and I use many of them when I travel when booking hotels. Ironically, when I was shopping for a house myself, I just ignored all the sites, flew to the city and drove around.

By: Galen

Galen — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 19:02:16 +0000

Joel, I love referencing that LL Cool J lyric. I am so angry you used it on your blog; now I will have to wait a few months before using it myself.

By: Miami Title Company

Miami Title Company — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 15:50:24 +0000

Neighborhood sites are a great way for potential buyers to follow up with an area they liked, and to make the final decision to buy there. Hopefully in the future as the technology gets easier to use and everybody is more familiar, there will be great neighborhood sites for a lot more neighborhoods.

By: MIchael Wurzer

MIchael Wurzer — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:38:22 +0000

I just posted last night on the issue of organizing listing data by geography. Neighborhoods are tricky business and there hasn’t been a good solution to date, but I think the combination of some of the national data sets with dynamic input from real estate professionals could be the key to defining a national set of neighborhood data that could persist and allow collection and tracking of listings and related stats.

By: Sandy

Sandy — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 16:48:25 +0000

Thanks for the post Joel! Sorry to hear you weren't happy with our data. As with any startup company we are still growing and improving. We add new data every day so next time you try HomeZilla we should have your pubs and the school.

We have over 98% of schools in Canada and are always looking to get that number to 100% in the future we will be asking people to help grow our data by contributing data if interest to them.

Talk soon,
Sandy