Comments on: Optimal Home Location suggests a 'greener' place to live

Optimal Home Location suggests where you should live based on where you travel around town, potentially helping to cut your commute.

[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