Searching By Walk Score Values
February 20, 2009
By: Drew Meyers
Author's Website: http://youreachmedia.com
For those of you who haven’t heard of Walk Score, I’d highly recommend checking the site out and their real estate services. They announced a few early adopters of their API back in January at Inman, but all the integrations I’ve seen to date (Postlets and Ziprealty) have simply shown a Walk Score value on a listing detail page. A much deeper integration that the Walk Score folks are out pitching to potential partners is a “search by Walk Score” search filter. It comes as no surprise to me that one of the great innovators in real estate search, Estately, is one of the first sites (ColorProperty.com was the 1st) to include a “search by Walk Score” feature. As Matt Lerner pointed out on the Walk Score blog this week, you can now search for homes for sale on Estately that have a Walk Score of 90 or above within 1/4 mile of the new Seattle light rail. That’s pretty powerful from a buyer’s perspective. For Seattle buyers who value walkability and/or don’t have cars, it looks like they’ll have far better luck north of Downtown — you can see that there are currently 685 properties on the market in Seattle with a Walk Score above 90; most of them located north of Downtown.
I think the ability to search by the Walk Score value is extremely useful and valuable to “green” buyers who put a huge emphasis on local amenities, which is a significant portion of the population in largely liberal cities such as Portland and Seattle. I would guess we’ll see this type of search functionality on a number of sites in 2009, particularly since there is now such a great example implementation to show other potential partners. For the agents and brokers reading this, I would love to hear your feedback on the Estately integration. Is this type of search filter something you’d want to add (or have your IDX provider add) to the search interface on your own website?
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Rene' Fabre on February 20, 2009 8:11 pm
Hi Drew… I love Walk Score. It’s a great site. And, I’m really impressed how good it is most everywhere.
Ryan Martin on February 21, 2009 8:04 am
I can definitely see that value in a walk score Drew. It doesn’t really work for my rural market, but I can see it being a big hit in urban settings, such as Seattle where the traffic is… unfriendly.
Kansas City Real Estate on February 21, 2009 10:37 am
Love the site. I have been using it for a while. A 90 score would be great. I’m happy if one of my listings has a walk score above 30. Rail! In my area you live as far away from rails and highways as you can. People actually pay more.
Cedar Rapids Real Estate on February 21, 2009 3:01 pm
There are two types of Walkscore. One requires you (or says it requires you) to have some programming background, and the other just sends you a code which you copy and paste where it says on the HTML embed code. When I tried to use it on my site, you click on the walkscore, and it takes you off of your site to their site. Maybe I messed up somewhere along the line, but would like to add Walkscore to all of my listings as an added feature for my visitors. Maybe if I notify the people at WS, they can walk me through a different scenario. Very cool tool though for real estate websites!
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Waterfront Real Estate USA on April 4, 2009 7:30 am
Hmnn never tried Walk Score but will now. Thanks for the tip and also for the good read. Nice blog, someone has gone to great deal of effort.