Thinking of neighborhood definitions… One of the other mapping projects I spearheaded at Move was to use the neighborhood definitions given by agents on their listings (many MLS provide this as a field) to develop a unique set of “agent-defined” neighborhood definitions that was inspired by the work done by the neighborhood project. Besides realtor.com, I think only craigstlist is sitting on enough user-defined points to put together a truly unique nationwide set of neighborhoods.

It’s our hope that neighborhoods on the map drive traffic to neighborhood detail pages like homes on the map are an entry point to home detail pages. Time will tell if the Zindex is sufficient to attract that interest — but I’d love to hear suggestions for more effective hooks to Zillow’s local pages.

Overall, I agree completely that neighborhood map data is only valuable to small set of people who are looking to relocate.

Although I love these maps and nice tools (they are all great link bait for a tech point of view), I sometimes question their real usage by actual buyers. Obiviously for relo it’s a great tool.

If memory serves me correctly from the NAR Homebuyers report, the normal buyer purchases a home witin 8-11 miles from were they live currently. If that is the case, then how much usage do these tools really see, as I suspect most are famaliar with the areas they are interested in.

My personal experiance, is that most seem to be interested in finding out exactly what school their children will be going to more than anything else.

Thoughts?

Because I ran GIS databases for years (as a transportation engineer) before jumping into online real estate, I also have a GIS bias… And as a matter of fact, the Realtor.com Neighborhood widget I mentioned above has a GIS backend. Getting a new dataset to show up on the map is as simple as importing the data into the backend and maping it to a new option to the option box. The overlay tiles are actually generated on the fly, although the tiles are cached so areas that get hit often can display quickly.

The weakness of this approach is that you loose interactivity with the map once the maps are rendered. That’s why I think the work that Zillow put in to get each area to get highlighted on mouseover is really quite impressive. The drawback to that approach is that it appears to be quite front-end heavy and my guess is that it will be a lot more work to get useful heat maps out of that system (especially heat maps that render well cross-browsers).

I’ll keep my opinions on the internal team structure stuff to myself, but you make a very valid point that the listings were not better integrated into the project. Granted there is an option to show “home for sale” on the widget, but the bulk of the listing integration of neighborhood data happens around the Showcase product. (see the neighborhood info tab on any showcase listing for an example.)