The internet offers a ton of fun tools to find all types of information.
As a regular reader of many other blogs, I ran across a post on GeekEstateBlog that was about a new rental information website, Zilpy. As I delved into this post, I followed a link to Hotpads, another rental website. I’ve actually had a rental listing advertised on this site, but had never taken the time to play around with the features.
I guess I had a little extra time on my hands, but I started playing around. I discovered that if you to enter a zip code and then select the heat map for average income, you will be able to see visually how wealthy (or poor) are various parts of the St. Louis area (NOTE: if you unclick the boxes for the type of properties, all of the properties icons will disappear and you’ll get a better view of the city map).
Have you ever been traveling and are trying to get a feel for where the nicer parts of town are? Or maybe you are considering a relocation and want to get a feel for the affluence level of various parts of town. This map gives you a great visual to help you get the lay of the land.
Zoom out and you can even see how counties compare to each other on income level.
It also offers other ”heat maps”, giving you visual information on population density, per capita income, median age, percentage of renters, and median rental prices.
Karen Goodman
Karen Goodman is Founder of Arch City Homes and leads a team of top real estate agents in St. Louis, MO.
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Karen-
Glad you are following the Geek Estate Blog! So, do you like zilpy or hotpads better?
Drew – The Geek Estate Blog is a great read. Lots of great information.
I just took another look at both Hotpads and Zilpy, and think that my prefered site would depend on what I was using it for.
I really like the interface on Hotpads…the mapping function and the heatmaps. It is much easier to manipulate the mapping to focus on a particular area. But, there weren’t very many rentals listed, so it wouldn’t be the site I would chose if I was a renter looking for property.
Zilpy has 3 tabs for different type of users, but each of the tabs basically gives you the same 2 options for output. Still, I think the way they track the average sale price and how they compare recent rents to previous month rents would be really helpful for investors to decide where they might want to buy rental property. The demographics are set up in an easy to use format too so investors can understand the community that they are considering a purchase.
I still think Hotpads is more fun.
What does everyone else think?
Thanks for sharing such an interesting site. You’re showing your web savvy in this post.
Thanks for retweeting this post on flickr to all your 2400+ followers!