Thursday, July 23, 2009

For Sale Signs

Google is starting to mesh maps with real estate listings. How long will it be until there is an API for this that you can customize and search for properties near transit? Some sites are starting to do this. Perhaps at some point it would be good to mix in the H+T index to see what your monthly transportation bill will be when you buy a house. If you live in a more walkable neighborhood, you can offset the perhaps higher cost of your home with less transportation costs. It's coming, hopefully someone is on the case.

H/T On the Block

Flickr photo by Zoomar

1 comment:

Richard Layman said...

This is important. We considered it, but in retrospect, not as systematically as we should have, when we were looking for a house in the upper NW quadrant of DC.

It turns out we hit a home run--within 0.9 miles of the Takoma station on the red line and 2.5 blocks from a bus line, where 6 months after we moved in, they changed the service provision from only between Petworth (Green) and Takoma station, to to and from downtown during rush hour.

And it's within 1.25 miles of two supermarkets (I bike, we don't own a car although we are carshare members) and about 1 mile to the Takoma Park DC/MD commercial district, plus a micro-commercial district with two important services (barber, dry cleaner) two blocks from our home.

We did test the bus route, but only after we put in an offer.

And we considered transit access throughout the process in any case, but just notas rigorously as I think we could have. (I also considered bike distances to the supermarket and other basic services.)