Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research
Popular heatmap mashup Neighboroo (see Top 10 Real Estate 2.0 Sites) rolled out a new version of their site today, adding a slew of new features and rolling in a couple new data sources and overall, a much tighter design.
In its previous form, Neighboroo took publicly available data (largely from census data) and plotted it visually on a Google Maps interface. In its latest incarnation, it adds property data (housing costs) from Trulia, real time market activity (in select markets) from Altos Research and neighborhood video from Turnhere.
All of this content makes researching a neighborhood on Neighboroo a particularly rich experience. I could definitely see this site being useful to someone facing a major relocation or looking to move to a new city.
A search can start with a zip code or just by navigating the map interface. There is a secondary search page that allows you to break down a search into numerous color coded criteria, but unfortunately I found this kind of confusing and overly complex. An interesting concept that just doesn’t translate into a particularly usable interface, in my opinion.
In this release they’ve also rolled out Local Sponsorship opportunities, presumably for small businesses to advertise on individual zip codes. The setup apes Zillow’s new EZAds and are just a good a deal; sponsorship is little more than $1/day. Pretty affordable advertising really and a reasonable revenue stream for the young company.
This is just the type of site that one of the major real estate portals, someone like Yahoo! Real Estate, MSN or AOL would do well to acquire. Neighboroo, with scrappy attitude and some smart partnerships has built a compelling, sticky research tool that beats out most of what those mainstream media portals currently offer.
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5 Comment(s)
2 Trackback(s)
- From Just Dug Up | Apr 13, 2007
- From theresoldgumbootprincess | theresoldgumbootprincess | Nov 30, 1999
Rahul Singh | Apr 11, 2007 | Reply
Hai Joel,
The design is perfect if someone is searching for listings or probably a bit more. But the main issue is a search engine which can with the listings can also provide results for other Real Estate Search.
Indianpropertysearch can be an alternative.
Just Check it out:
http://www.indianpropertysearch.com
Marco B | Apr 11, 2007 | Reply
Neighboroo is somewhat interesting, but given that this is just 1 kid in a garage, and the data is all publicly available sources, it’s way too easy to replicate. This site doesn’t remotely register on Hitwise or Comscore. Everyone is using OnBoard for this kind of data, like they used to use Sperlings. The presentation might be interesting but ask Jakob Nielsen and he’ll tell you that Heat Maps are a poor user interface choice as they only appeal to power users and not the masses. Nothing here worth buying. The big guys should get off their you-know-whats and just license the data from OnBoard and build it out themselves. This company will end up on the Web 2.0 Deadpool in 12 months.
Great Idea | Apr 11, 2007 | Reply
Move.com should acquire them, though I’m not sure you could overlay this into Realtor.com. Trulia’s neighborhood guides are much better. Even Reply.com has some interesting stuff.
To Marco’s comment on Hitwise-Comscore traffic…if you don’t have the users, then there’s no way you’re going to sell any ads. And all those great posts recently on how many page views you need to have to make any decent money…this start-up is in trouble.
Neighboroo | Apr 12, 2007 | Reply
Thanks to everyone for the open critique.
Joel, we tried to make search as easy as possible and experimented with this new UI. Evidently, it didn’t pass your test. We’re figuring out alternatives.
Macro B, you sound like a commercial for OnBoard. We are not exactly “1 kid in a garage” though our team is small and nimble. Frankly, that’s exactly why we won’t be in the DeadPool. We don’t have much overhead, allowing us to experiment and innovate. We’re figuring out the best way to help users understand a neighborhood.
Heat maps from thermodynamics is for power users, but simplified thematic maps (which is technically what we do) are easy to understand. If you want proof, just do a search for Neighboroo on any big blog search engine and listen to the “masses”.
Marco B, our data is not all from “publicly available sources”. We work with partners in the private sector. It’s funny because anyone in the industry knows that *a lot* comes from “publicly available sources”, a.k.a. the government. I come from this data provider industry. Type “demographics” into Google, and you’ll see a bazillion vendors repackaging government data providing their own “secret sauce”. What’s the secret sauce? Some statistical algorithms to guess how the figures have changed from 1998 (provided by Census 2000) to 2007. Neighboroo applies the same algorithms. We just don’t resell it at an insane price.
Christian Sterner | Apr 12, 2007 | Reply
Well done to Neighboroo! They have a great team, and I wouldn’t be quick to send them to the “dead pool.”