US based civic software company Front Seat, has added an innovative new search function to its already impressive Walk Score application.
The new Transit Time Maps will allow users to search a location’s transit time. This in turn opens the door for property search via commuting time.
As the company writes on its blog:
“Homes near transit are some of the only properties that have appreciated in value over the last year—yet other than estately.com, we haven’t found any real estate sites that let you find homes near transit.
Yesterday we took a baby step towards helping people find walkable, transit-friendly homes with the release of our Transit Time Maps. Eventually, real estate sites will be able to use this technology for searches like, ‘Find me homes within a 30 minute transit commute from work’.”
We’ve reported on WalkScore before, and it’s been rapidly adopted by real estate websites like zillow.com and several US brokerage firms. Walk Score works by calculating the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. This produces a ranking out of 100, ranging from 0-24 which is a rather dire ‘car dependent’ location to a magnificent 90-100, which is classed as a ‘Walkers’ Paradise’.
Searching for property by transit times is a natural progression from Walk Scores.
The new functionality operates using Graphserver, an open source multi-modal trip planner (like Google Transit) and is currently only available for the Seattle, Portland and San Francisco areas, with more to come.
In the UK, nestoria.co.uk has kept ahead of the pack in terms of cool search applications and has already launched a similar function called where-can-i-live.com? It allows Londoners to find a property based on their commuting time to work.
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