Some Examples of Zillow’s Neighborhood Boundaries Integrated — Zilpy and TeachStreet
By: Drew Meyers, Business Development Specialist | April 29, 2008
Since we released our 7,000 neighborhood boundary polygons under Creative Commons license, we’ve seen several integrations that we’d like to highlight.
The 1st is Zilpy, a real estate site focused on providing rental statistics and helping you figure out where to live. Zilpy was the first site we learned of that had integrated the boundary files into their application. I actually wrote about the site over on the Geek Estate Blog back in January. They display the boundaries lines right on the map if you are zoomed into the city level (Seattle example). In addition to using them for navigation within a city, Zilpy calculates statistics such as median rent and average square footage using the neighborhood boundaries.
In addition to Zilpy, TeachStreet is now live with their integration. TeachStreet’s goal is to “encourage life-long learning by connecting inquiring minds with quality instructors.” For example, if I wanted to learn Spanish and live in Seattle, TeachStreet enables me to find Spanish teachers in my area. TeachStreet’s implementation is a great example of using neighborhood boundaries in a search scenario — to filter search results by neighborhood. The neighborhood you live in is one of the most important criteria when determining what teacher you choose to contact, so they have nailed this search scenario in my mind. You can see a map of the neighborhood on the right side of the search results (seen below). The founder, Dave Schappell, posted a thread in Zillow Discussions mentioning their integration (hint: good idea).
I should also note another example previously covered on Zillow Blog — Andrew Mattie, a developer at Diverse Solutions, coded up a mashup using the Zillow API and our neighborhood boundaries.
As we come across more compelling integrations, we’ll try to highlight them here on Zillow Blog. If you have a website with the neighborhood boundaries integrated, please leave a note in the developer section of Zillow Discussions. We’ll keep a list of companies using the neighborhood boundaries here.
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Comments
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Dave Schappell on April 29, 2008 2:35 pm
Drew — thanks for the shout-out. We’re loving the neighborhood data; we think it makes the experience much richer for our users. This is a great example of a fantastic Creative Commons data source — thanks to Team Zillow for making it happen!
Dave Schappell
Founder and CEO
TeachStreet
Overland Park Real Estate on April 29, 2008 6:57 pm
Thanks for the information. As more and more data comes in I am sure these will become increasingly useful.
Richard Dale-mesaros on April 30, 2008 6:30 am
Cheers Drew!
As a full time real estate investor, I spend a fair amount of time doing ‘due diligence’ on out-of-state markets and I’ll certainly be using Zilpy’s neighborhood facility. The more insights investors can get before making an acquisition, the less risk we’re exposing ourselves too. Kudos to Zilpy for putting their resources into this project.
Yours with boundless enthusiasm,
Richard
Chief Deal Weaver
http://www.BlackWidowNetwork.com
Bogdan Cirlig on April 30, 2008 11:09 am
Drew, thank you for using Zilpy as example. We love the Neighborhood data and certainly we have attached a lot of Rental value to it. People relate very well to familiar neighborhood names they know rather than Zipcodes. Thanks again to Zillow Team for the effort and dedication.
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[…] want the search to allow overlays of important data - crime, Walk Score, GIS information, neighborhood boundaries, and more, and I want to be able to share that search with my clients, readers, customers - and […]
This is what I want | VARbuzz on May 9, 2008 9:33 am
[…] want the search to allow overlays of important data - crime, Walk Score, GIS information, neighborhood boundaries, and more, and I want to be able to share that search with my clients, readers, customers - and […]
How Walkable is Your Neighborhood? | Zillow® Blog on June 13, 2008 1:57 pm
[…] Zillow’s neighborhood boundary files (available via a Creative Commons license), here are a couple other examples of live implementations to give you some ideas. It’s pretty easy… it’s like, […]