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by bombcar 1106 days ago
This kind of tool would be absolutely brilliant as part of Zillow.

I'd love to see various distances from properties assuming bike, or walking, or driving, etc.

Everyone who lives in a neighborhood knows these things, but it's really hard to figure it out before without traveling there and attempting some things.

2 comments

I've sort of done this using the Walk score transit heat maps (they have similar for biking and walking as well) for getting a more broad feel for what areas are walkable/bikeable/less car dependant while house shopping, using a user script that takes the map tiles from Walkscore and injects them into the Google maps instance on Zillow. However, you could definitely generate the distance from a point heat/contour maps using QGIS/OSM data and overlay the tiles that way as well.

Would be super nice if this was built into Zillow, or any MLS browsing tool for that matter...

Zillow already has that. You input an address and it tells you the distance in time by transportation method on each property details screen. You can also sort properties according to distance from the given address. The software labels it a "work" address, but you will face no consequences for using an address that you do not work at.
The problem is that this shows you how long it takes to get to a single place, rather than showing a map visualization like this site. I've often really wanted this on StreetEasy especially. I don't want to know how long it takes just to get to work, I want to know how long it takes to every neighborhood I regularly travel to.
Agree it could be better. I recently moved and wanted to be close to work but also close to a few friends. It would be cool if you could put in two (or more) locations and it would map out areas. I'm sure some ones would have popped up I didnt consider.
Exactly. Commute time is interesting and useful but easy to find in a million ways.

I want to know all the places I don’t know about that are X minutes away.