ActiveRainers if your city is a featured City on R.com Neighborhoods (list below) did you look to see what R.com is telling the public about neighborhoods and pricing your your market? Accurate?
Realtor.com Neighborhoods- Including a video about Neighborhoods.
I wondered why Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Pittsburgh were not on the list of "Featured Cities" on Realtor.com but one area with less than 3000 listings is. If I may borrow a line from Sesame Street "One of these things is not like the others."
Featured Cities on R.com Neighborhoods
Atlanta
Austin
Baltimore
Boston
Charlotte
Chicago
Columbus
Dallas
Denver
Houston
Indianapolis
Jacksonville
Kansas City
Las Vegas
Los Angeles
Louisville
Miami
Milwaukee
Minneapolis
New York
Orlando
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Raleigh
Sacramento
San Antonio
San Diego
San Francisco
San Jose
Seattle
Tampa
Thousand Oaks
Tucson
Washington D.C.
Did you pick out which one of those things is not like the other. Do you think they did that one first? R.com Neighborhoods is an "ALPHA" does that mean R.com Neighborhoods is not as advanced as BETA? R.com is rougher than a BETA? Not as ready?
Maybe Ceveland, Cincinnati, Detroit and Pittsburgh are lucky they are not on the map.
Mainly R.com Neighborhoods is just real estate by ZIP code in Central Ohio. Buyers think I want to buy a home in Worthington or Dublin... or I want to buy a home in Worthington Schools or Dublin Schools. Are they going to find a search that cobbles together distinctly different neighborhoods common only in ZIP code and find useful information? I don't believe I have ever heard a buyer express I am looking for a home in 43085, or 43017. ZIP codes in our area are bizarre, school district boundaries are irregular. Giving consumers average pricing by ZIP code seems absurd to me. City services in Central Ohio are not uniform across a ZIP code.
Localism has a better list of Columbus neighborhoods than R.com does. R.com Neighborhoods are mostly cities, suburbs of Columbus like Westerville, Worthington, Dublin, Powell, Upper Arlington. Grandview Heights made the list three times or maybe the third one is City of Columbus neighborhoods near Grandview Heights. I know Trulia.com had a Grandview, Grandview Heights confusion going on early on too. Not sure if Trulia ever resolved their Grandview confusion.
Of course R.com hopes Realtors and ordinary people are going to build the neighborhoods for them. What is the incentive to do so?
I have found a bunch of bizarre things locally on R.com Neighborhoods. Parts of Powell in the wrong county. Clintonville is in Summit County (the Akron area.) A "neighborhood" it is a city really in Hamilton County (Cinci area.) Then there seem to be areas that were made up, bundled together and given names. I wrote about R.com Neighborhoods on my other blog, ColumbusBestBlog.com a few times this week.
Where is Powell Ohio? R.com is way off on home prices, they are just using the 43065 ZIP code as a neighborhood. The map shows Delaware County and Franklin County as Powell.
What's Worthington? R.com has a lower than reality home price. R.com is using the 43085 ZIP so saying the Worthington neighborhood includes some City of Columbus homes in the Worthington School District, but not all Worthington Ohio homes because many are in other ZIP codes.
Clintonville Neighborhood R.com identifies Clintonville as Summit County (Akron area) R.com used the Clintonville Beechwold areas plus all the surrounding smaller neighborhoods in the MLS area. Or did they just use the Clintonville and Beechwold ZIP codes?
Clintonville Average Price Pricing is distorted.
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Very good. I have often had questions of my own. Not a conspiracy but concerns..
Connor MacIVOR
I took a look the other day, not impressed.
Hmmm... typical of r dot com. Thanks for the post.
Maureen,
I did not realize what was missing until you brought it to light. I am not sure what values determine where R.com is coming from. Thanks for pointing it out.
I will check this out thanks, is RL back in florida yet?
Active Rain did not have neighborhoods until the bloggers put them in and in my area there aren't enough to of us to even touch the area. Our incentive to build the database is that we make it useful and people would want to visit there instead of some of some other sites that are starting to become popular.
I will check this out today - I haven't noticed this before. Thanks for the update
I saw the video clip on this on Inman News but hadn't checked out the product yet. I'll have to dig around a bit and see what they've done.
I will give R.com and look to check out my city. Thanks for the update.
Totally useless. They apparently think Washington D.C. or Baltimore City MD represent our market area. We are NOT an urban market. We are a suburban market, not a center city market. This site is useless for my area.
Thanks for the comments all. Neighborhoods on R.com is an Alpha, really, really not ready for prime time, is what that means. I can't remember seeing anything online like that and saying it was an "Alpha" before. I know with the big web 2.0 boom I started noticing a lot of applications that said "Beta." I wondered if maybe A was better than B like in grading but Wikipedia says :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle#Beta
Beta version software is likely to be useful for internal demonstrations and previews to select customers, but unstable and not yet ready for release. Some developers refer to this stage as a preview, a prototype, a technical preview (TP) or as an early access. As the second major stage in the release lifecycle, following the alpha stage, it is named after the Greek letter beta, the second letter in the Greek alphabet.
Beta's are not ready for release and this as an Alpha is not that far along. Nice bells and whistles, with the heat maps but looking at the maps doesn't tell anything because the numbers are so far off, at least those that I can verify.
I really really want to know from people in
Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose , Seattle, Tampa, Tucson, and Washington D.C. how realistic the neighborhoods in their area look, if there is any reality to the home pricing. There are crazy, crazy rental amounts on many of the Central Ohio neighborhoods, but someplace they say something about there is no rental info available for Columbus.
Brian wrote: is RL back in Florida yet?
Real Living? There's an RL Group on AR. Jim H. is in the Orlando area? And there someone in I want to say the Tampa area too.... actually there are two or three Florida ActiveRain members... who are Real Living franchisees, I think.
I checked out Charlotte and the information is terribly incomplete and many of the options don't function...it doesn't look like they are ready for prime time!
Thanks Diane. It is hard to judge other markets... but I was hoping it was not just Columbus. I don't think I have ever been aware of an Alpha before.
I wonder what the incentive for anyone local to get involved is. I think a Realtor did two neighborhoods in our market. It does not link to him, it looks like it should though.