I’m pretty bearish on so-called ‘neighborhood’ sites right now. Relying on user generated content to provide information on local areas seems to me to be a tenuous proposition at best. This is particular evident at some of the higher-profile sites; the ghost town that is StreetAdvisor, Yourstreet folding up shop (see Yourstreet is Now Empty) – though they, at least, promise to relaunch in a different form.

One neighborhood site that I’ve found particularly useful however is rather beautiful in its simplicity. Walk Score is a mashup that calculates how pedestrian friendly your neighborhood is by asking the question; “How Walkable is your House?”

Punch in your street address and the site maps a series of local landmarks it has pulled from Google Base; grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops etc. – all relative to your location. Walk Score was refreshingly accurate in my neighborhood at least.

So, how does it work?

Walk Score™ uses a patent-pending algorithm to calculate the walkability of an address based on:

• The distance to walkable locations near an address.
• Calculating a score for each of these locations.
• Combining these scores into one easy to read Walk Score.

Brilliant. Walkability, at least for me, is huge criteria that goes into finding a new home. My current house scored a meager 62 out of 100, unfortunately. Better than Bill Gates however, whose house scored a microscopic 5 on the scale or George W. Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch which got the big old Goose Egg.

I’d love to see this kind of integration into a broker or real estate search site. Very valuable information, beautifully executed.

Walk Score was created by the Sightline Institute, Cascadia’s (self-proclaimed) sustainability think tank. (For more on Cascadia, read this).

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It seems that city level real estate search is so thoroughly saturated now (Trulia, Shackprices, Move.com, Homegain, even Zillow getting in the game) that next great trend for web 2.0 services is a virtual land rush to cover your neighborhood, even your street.

Neighborhood Crossing launched this week (see Bringing neighbors together with NeighborhoodCrossing.com) by offering to help you connect with your neighbors online. The motivation behind the site? Neighborhood Crossing says:

It’s strange: these days, you can know people across the world, and not know who lives two houses down the street. That’s why we made neighborhoodcrossing.com.Our mission is to help you turn your neighborhood into a vibrant, well-connected place.

It’s a good pitch. In my post Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate, I wrote how home owner associations or condo stratas could build out a social network of home owners. And I still think that may have merit as an interesting marketing gimmick for developer or builder. Especially if it were built on an existing platform (Facebook, Ning) that could be quickly scaled up.

Neighborhood Crossing strikes me as service whose heart is in the right place but I just can’t see it going very far. It didn’t help that I got numerous ‘Error processing your request’ messages across the site either.

Ultimately a successful web site solves a problem. Finding an good aggregated source of real estate listings online was a problem (still is, arguably) and the web gods have responded by giving us umpteen different options to choose from these days.

Personally though, I’ve never had a problem talking to my neighbors. And even if I wanted/needed to connect with them I’m not sure it isn’t something that couldn’t be accomplished with a Yahoo Group or even a shared Gmail calendar.

StreetAdvisor, on the other hand, takes the neighborhood concept even further (see the post on Realty Thoughts) allowing people to rate your neighbors, the nightlife, noise levels, even the quality of mobile reception and internet speeds.

Interesting concept – I’m thinking of moving right now and access to decent broadband is definitely an important criteria in a neighborhood for me. The site is usable and designed nicely enough though it suffers from a definite lack of content. Nothing worse than when you go to a site and find nothing but the crickets chirping.

They were giving away iPods to stimulate street reviews – no sure that will help. They’d do well to seed the site with content, but that’s a pretty big challenge when you’re hoping to compile data on every street in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. It’s a lofty goal that might be better realized if they just focused on one city. How about Portland?

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