I was looking at zillow.com’s website a moment ago, looking for ways to improve my site when I bumped into a little icon that had a “walk score” next to it. The property had a walk score of 14 and underneath he score it said “Car Dependent” and I thought “Is this some kind of algorithm to judge a place’s walkability?” Of course, it was, or rather is… otherwise this post would end right now with “Wouldn’t that be neat?”
Here’s an example of walkscore.com’s Walk Score app for a random listing I pulled in Laguna Beach:
1855 Ocean, Laguna Beach, CA, 92651
Looks like it gets a “75/100″ which puts that home at a “Very Walkable” rank… I love it…
I’m calling my developers right now and getting this implemented into my listings.
Note: It looks like the “Walk Score Tile” that they provide is having some trouble in the Internet Explorer browser (at least on mine it is)… take it for a spin here: http://www.walkscore.com. Happy walking!
Archive for February, 2009
Irvine, CA Neighborhood Maps
Friday, February 13th, 2009One of my clients is relocating to the Dallas, Texas area and since I’m not familiar with the lay of the land, I thought I’d check it out on Google Maps… you know – just to get some sense of the place… If you search for “Dallas, TX” in Google Maps, it of course centers on Dallas… on the left hand side, there was an area called “User-Created Maps” that had a link to “Dallas Texas Neighborhoods” and I thought “Perfect!” and clicked. Here’s the link I ended up with – Dallas Texas Neighborhoods. On the Google map are overlays created by someone that delineate the neighborhoods in the area.. not all of them, but enough to provide some utility…
I immediately thought about our local real estate market in Orange County and what it must be like to be in any other state and have to move here for whatever reason, be it for the simple pleasure of joining all of us or to relocate for a job… whatever it may be…
I searched for “Irvine, CA” in Google Maps and didn’t see anything like the Dallas neighborhood maps, so I thought I’d create my own for Irvine. Here’s what I put together::
View Larger Map
If you click the colored areas, a pop-up with information on that neighborhood and/or business district comes up.
The actual link to that map is:
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?gl=us&hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=114136910610563076864.000462abeed72952e52f5&z=12
I think I like it and I think I’m going to start doing them for a few other communities in the area; I’ll let you know what I come up with.
