Optimal Home Location suggests a 'greener' place to live

If you can't decide where to move but want to live close to where you travel every day, Optimal Home Location ( via EcoGeek) suggests a spot. If you hope to shrink your carbon footprint, reducing your commute time can be a key factor.

First, Optimal Home Location found a spot smack in the center of my job and daily pit stops.

This Google Maps-based tool integrates with real estate site Zillow to display a given area's home prices, taxes, and the percentage of households with children. I plugged in six addresses for the places I visit most around San Francisco, including work, where friends live, and my favorite restaurants and grocery store. The site computed the location most central to those places, where I neither desire nor can afford to rent or buy a place.

Optimal Home Location then asked for details about the order in which I frequent specific locations. It also requested the commute of someone else in my household, which happens to be virtually identical to my own.

The site wound up telling me to live on the same street as my office. I took this as a perhaps depressing hint that my life centers around work, and promptly decided to take a class--mosaic making, hang gliding, welding, anything--in a far-flung neighborhood.

This service is fun to play with, but it's no more than a nice start for plotting a potential move. If you're familiar with a city, chances are you already have a sense of where you'd like to hang your hat versus what's realistic for your budget or other lifestyle limitations. As Optimal Home Location explains, its geometric calculations "do not take into account the feasibility of the area for living." Maybe something more sophisticated in the future could blend more data with community suggestions.

This Web site ultimately told me to live at work.

Still, you can also describe alternative driving commutes among various spots on a map for estimates of the traveling time and gas expenses you'd face over a year. One big flaw, if you're trying to "green" your life, is the lack of information about bus and subway stops, walkability, and bike lanes. At least you can add pinpoints to the map to mark personal points of interest.

This service would be most helpful paired with other online maps and ratings tools. For example, you could type an address from Optimal Home Location's suggestions into WalkScore (more here), which rates an area's friendliness for trekking around on two feet. Google Transit (more here) would also be helpful for public transit routes.

Also see our Moving 2.0 roundup of services including maps of housing prices, fair rent calculators, and more tools to find data about a neighborhood's demographics and lousy neighbors.

[dbargen]

OR you could choose your home based on where property taxes, utilities, insurance, and transportation costs will be the least, balanced with time willing to spend in commute and what venues you want within a reasonable difference. Let's not forget to include projected home value increases in your evaluation

Integration like this using zwillow and google is all good and well, but as of now none of them are accurate to find all the pertinent information. It often takes deep research to find a target area to live, whether you're a greenie or normal person. Sadly, there's no one stop information center for home buyers. On the other hand, those with savvy can find the hot item than others that don't.

At this point, be careful what you wish for.

[Penguinisto]

So - does the thing mention crime rates?

Let's say... Smack in between all your parameters is an area that you wouldn't want your worst enemy to live in... it's somewhat in line with property taxes and prices, but you stand a good chance of getting your car or house broken into if you lived there.

Do these web services take that into account?

Okay, how about situations concerning schools - say you have kids, and you want those kids to go to a school you know is decent (or rather, avoid the schools with the lowest standardized test scores, etc). Do schools figure into any of this? (I noticed it did mention kids, so at least that's a plus).

I assume they're grabbing info from local gov't property records, census info, etc, yes? How often is the info updated?

[renicolay]

@dbargen & @Penguinsto- You both make good points. I would suggest you take a look at Cyberhomes.com. Cyberhomes is backed by Fidelity National Finance which brings years of expertise in the homeownership information business. As a result Cyberhomes has:

- More than 100 million properties. 575,000+ new records added monthly.
- More than 120 seperate data fields per record.
- School data, Rentals, Foreclosures, Mortgage
- Heat maps for visual searching by neighborhood characteristics, type of neighbors, even lifestyle.

Best regards,
Reggie from Cyberhomes