…I really like how they’ve mapped it out! 
The Realtor.com team recently turned on a “heat map” option within their home valuation tool. Here’s a heat map of Ballard in Seattle where you can really see the detail of the more expensive areas (in particular the areas around the water!):
It’s clean, fast and well implemented. On my version of firefix (v 3) on a Mac, I’m not seeing the legend that others appearently can see, but that is the only hole I can find in the implementation.
To get an idea of just how detailed these maps are, it’s worth comparing to the previous implementation that exists on on the neighborhood page for this same area on realtor.com showing average neighborhood list price:
I think it is also worth noting that neither Zillow or Trulia have done much to bring the same level of detail to the maps… For example, Trulia’s heat maps are limited to the neighborhood level with boundaries…
And the option to display heat maps on Zillow no longer seems to be available (although I did find this page which shows what they used to look like on Zillow).
Anyway I love maps and think they can convey a ton of great information about neighborhoods and homes, so it’s great to see someone pushing the boundaries even if I’ve been giving the team a hard time recently for other issues (see realtor.com home values and realtor.com blog hack articles).
Dustin-
You caught on to the fact that we lost our heatmap functionality — it happened when we switched over to Microsoft aerial imagery a couple months ago. We do think it’s a cool feature and will try to add the feature back at some point; it’s just a matter of prioritizing that work against the other features our development team is working on.
I’m glad to hear it is missing because I spent at least 10 minutes searching for it… I liked the heatmaps when you guys first launched but think the recent realtor.com implementation is even better so you guys might take a few queues from them when you go to rebuild the functionality!
Dustin – I never thought I would read that line – “take a few queues from (Realtor.com)” – Ever.
And I like the maps, too; ‘course it’s ridiculously and irresponsibly inaccurate for my market, but still … that’s why it’s “alpha” I guess.
Jim: I couldn’t resist!
Dustin,
Never thought I would say this but Realtor.com nailed it. Best I have seen out there. They are starting to get it and with their hands on relationship with Realtors, their information will be accurate. Great post.
Bruce
Anoteh
Oops, shoot for backspace and you get Enter…
What I meant to say was another great tool that I’ve been using for real estate searches, etc. is the website by PropertyMaps. It has been an incredible tool. Another good thing is that they teamed up with RealtyTrac for foreclosure information.