Real estate and the power of mashups

You’ve got to love this. For those who doubt the power and value of the internet, have a look at the map below, which shows the density of single women across San Francisco, together with their earnings. For example, in Pacific Heights near Alta Plaza Park, more than a third of the residents are single women, with average incomes of over $80,000. Or if you’re looking for eligible husbands, go to Property Shark where this map was taken from, and click over to find the distribution of single men and their earning capacity across the city. There are any number of other choices available on the web site to gain insights into where you want to live in any city across the US.

Source: PropertyShark.com

The first famous locational mashup was of course Chicago Crime, which in 2005 started using Google Maps to create maps showing where crime was occurring across the city. Not surprisingly, among the first users were those selecting where to live in the city. In our Future of Media Report 2006 we showed that 47% of mashups were based on mapping, indicating the power of location in bringing together disparate data sets. Google Maps unleashed the domain, and now it has spread far beyond. Almost all real estate websites now use mapping mashups – this is something of great value available online that high street real estate agents don’t offer (though they’d better get access to something quick if they want to continue to get people coming in off the street). Zillow has quickly become one of the top property sites by providing estimated valuations, Trulia has some great heat maps of recent property sales activity, RealEstateFu shows trends in Bay Area housing prices over a number of years, and many others explore different facets of how to decide where we want to live.