Couple of days back browsing though the Zillow blog I came across Neighboroo which provides a nice mashup of local data and Google Maps. Using Neighboroo you can easily view data related to lifestyle, school ranking, home price, apartment rent, political affiliation, and for few other categories for your area. Neighboroo information maps are color coded to enable you to easily observe trends in a particular area.
Lets assume that you are moving to NYC area and not sure about the cost of living, crime rate, and apartment rent, Neighboroo is the best way get those stats quickly. For any search you make at Neighboroo, it generates a color coded info map showing important information related to the area on an information bubble. On the result page, you can quickly view maps for different criteria and switch between Info, Map, and Satellite views. Neighboroo gives out permalinks for your results to enable easier linking to the search results. ‘More info’ page for each city/zip search gives you all the data related to real estate, people, ethnicity, and crime on one page.
Neighboroo provides good explanation about the methodology used to come up with the results for each category. Take the case of ‘Lifestyle’ in which Neighboroo categorizes residents of a region into sixteen different segments. Each of these segments indicate the household’s stage in life(college student, young single, young family, family, mature family, and retiree) and spending preferences(Modest Means, Comfortable, and Living Well). So, for your NYC area search you will get the primary group as Young Singles(Living Well) and secondary group to be Families(Modest Means). For regions that have people falling in more than 1 segment, Neighboroo shows only the primary group and the second group is shown in the information bubble.
According to Neighboroo website, they gather their data from various sources including government, partners, and even individuals. This means that data might not be the most recent available or the most accurate. Anyway Neighboroo aims to provide trends in a particular area instead of being a real-time and highly accurate local stats provider.
Links:
Neighboroo
