Dataset of the Day: Westchester County, Real Estate, and Maker!

Searching for a place to live can be a daunting task, especially if you are relocating and are unfamiliar with the new area. There are so many factors that you may want to take into consideration regarding the neighborhood you choose. School ratings and access to libraries and parks may be important factors if you have children. Perhaps you are looking for plenty of entertainment options and want to make sure you live near restaurants and theaters. Maybe you need to make sure that you will have access to public transportation or to bike trails for a commute to work. Usually this requires looking up addresses, figuring out school boundaries and going back and forth from housing listings to Internet sites to maps. There are plenty of sites on the internet that map out some of these factors but these are always limited to what factors the site has chosen to include.

With Finder! and Maker! you can create you own interactive maps that allow you to put any data you feel is important to your decision on a map. Then you display each layers together with the locations of the homes you are considering.

To demonstrate how this can work, I have used Westchester County, New York as an example. Lets imagine someone has taken a job in Manhattan and will be relocating. Because they have a family with school age children they would like to buy a home in Westchester County and then commute to work. Most of the data used in this example are taken from the publicly available database of the Westchester County Geographic Information Systems website. I simply downloaded the datasets I wanted and then uploaded them to Finder!. The rest are datasets I found doing a search in Finder!.

First our family wants to look at amenities for their children so they create a map that displays schools districts by their score from greatschools.net. With this map they can add library locations and park locations. This way they can find areas with good schools and that have plenty of libraries and parks nearby. They decided that some of the schools districts in southern Westchester County are preferable because of a higher concentration of libraries and parks.

Next our family takes into consideration where they can live a more “green” lifestyle. They will be commuting into Manhattan rather than driving so they need to live in an area with a commuter train station. They would also like to live near trails so they can take walks and bike rides as much a possible so they add a layer for the County Trail System. This is a also great opportunity to use Finder’s new opencyclemap base map which features bike trails and contours lines. Finally, our family wants to buy as much local food as possible so they add a layer of farmer’s market locations. After examining this map, our family decides that although the western side of the county has more train stations, they prefer central and eastern areas of southern Westchester county because they would have more options of walking to local farmers markets. Having narrowed down their desired area, our family is finally ready to start looking at homes. They can geocode their own house listings, upload them to Finder!, and create a map with the houses displayed by price. Finally, they want to be able to see the proximity of the homes to recreational activities. Here they choose to map theater locations and beaches. Let’s imagine they choose the home in the map below. This home fits in their price range, is very close to two theaters and is fairly close to some beaches. Looking back to all our data, we can see that this house is in a school district with a greatschools.net score of 10, has three libraries nearby and is close to many parks. Also, the house is very close to three train stations. There is also a farmer’s market that can be reached by a trail. By mapping out the features that are important to this family, they were able to pinpoint an area they liked and to find a home whose location was ideal to them. Of course they will want to take a look at the house and the surrounding area in person to verify that the information is correct, especially in regards to walkability. By using Finder! and Maker! together with some cool open source data and your own home listings, it is easy to create maps that can help you choose the best home and neighborhood for you. To see the datasets used here as well as other Westchester County datasets click here.