A little while ago I blogged about new features to be released on REALTOR.com® and finally the first major one is here. Now you will find the neighborhood info tab right next to the photo gallery tab in the detailed listing view.
As a result, the visitor is able to get more detailed information about the neighborhood of the property being viewed and the neighborhood information consists of two major types of data:
- Community Information
- School Data
Inside the Community Report you will find statistics about demographics broken down into 10 categories and neighborhood amenities are broken down in 5 different categories. Moving over to the School Information tab, one can select up to 8 different schools and compare them column by column.
All the data is provided by Onboard LLC, Virtual Earth maps with user generated data overlays are available, and all of this is combined with colorful charts.
Of course it is not perfect and as far as I can tell a couple of bugs still need to be worked out. Currently the mapping feature is only accurate inside the Maps & Directions Tab, however inside the Neighborhood Info Tab the mapping feature does not zoom-in on the selected properties in our neck of the woods. Most likely there are some issues of pulling over the address data from the Arizona Multiple Listing Service to REALTOR.com®. Another issue I noticed is that the Neighborhood Info tab is invisible in the new Safari Browser for Windows XP or Vista.
It will be interesting to see what REALTOR.com® comes up with next….
Nicely done. I’ve been doing a lot of work on where listings should be published online, and I haven’t looked at Realtor.com in awhile, even though at one time of course it was THE place (and still #1 I understand). I’ll have to give it another look.
Very nice blog.
Cheers,
Thanks for good info on the Realtor.com updates.
Thanks for the write up! We haven’t even done any press on that yet so it was a good find on your part.
In terms of the zooming to listings on the community page, I don’t think it was designed to show other things (or even the listing in question) on that page. The idea is to present neighborhood information for each listing and not necessarily display the listing or other listings. Nonetheless, when I look at your page, I can completely see how it would be useful to be able to zoom into the listing even on the community page, so I’m going to share that bit of feedback with the team!
Best.
You are very welcome Dustin! There are a couple more observations I made which I would love for you to share with the team:
When looking at a listing on realtor.com in Dallas, Texas, the property is correctly displayed and the marker is positioned at the address location of the property when zooming in using the map from the Neighborhood Info Tab. When looking at a listing in the Phoenix Metro Area and zooming in from the Neighborhood Info Tab the marker is nowhere close to that property address on the map. This leads me to believe that the maps in the Neighborhood Info Tab are designed to have the property clearly marked at the property address. This just makes sense since most people would like to know where the property is located in respect to the neighborhood amenities.
The other thing which is not working in the Phoenix Metro Area is that the final Destination is not displayed with the complete property address when using “Get custom Driving Directions†from the Map & Directions Tab. The marker on the map is positioned at the approximate property address on the map but the detailed property address is missing. Some people may argue that this may not be a big deal since the marker is displayed on the map, however imagine if there is no for sale sign at the property and it happens to be that the property is located in a hard to navigate subdivision. Without the detailed address it would be impossible to ask for directions when calling the agent or asking a neighbor. The big question is if this is just a compatibility issue from ARMLS to get the address data to realtor.com or if this is due to some silly MLS rule prohibiting displaying the final destination address. Again there is no problem with this functionality in Dallas, TX, but it is not working in the Phoenix Metro Area.
Let me know if you get some feedback for these issues.