Since we released our 7,000 neighborhood boundary polygons under Creative Commons license, we’ve seen several integrations that we’d like to highlight.
The 1st is Zilpy, a real estate site focused on providing rental statistics and helping you figure out where to live. Zilpy was the first site we learned of that had integrated the boundary files into their application. I actually wrote about the site over on the Geek Estate Blog back in January. They display the boundaries lines right on the map if you are zoomed into the city level (Seattle example). In addition to using them for navigation within a city, Zilpy calculates statistics such as median rent and average square footage using the neighborhood boundaries.
In addition to Zilpy, TeachStreet is now live with their integration. TeachStreet’s goal is to “encourage life-long learning by connecting inquiring minds with quality instructors.” For example, if I wanted to learn Spanish and live in Seattle, TeachStreet enables me to find Spanish teachers in my area. TeachStreet’s implementation is a great example of using neighborhood boundaries in a search scenario — to filter search results by neighborhood. The neighborhood you live in is one of the most important criteria when determining what teacher you choose to contact, so they have nailed this search scenario in my mind. You can see a map of the neighborhood on the right side of the search results (seen below). The founder, Dave Schappell, posted a thread in Zillow Discussions mentioning their integration (hint: good idea).
I should also note another example previously covered on Zillow Blog — Andrew Mattie, a developer at Diverse Solutions, coded up a mashup using the Zillow API and our neighborhood boundaries.
As we come across more compelling integrations, we’ll try to highlight them here on Zillow Blog. If you have a website with the neighborhood boundaries integrated, please leave a note in the developer section of Zillow Discussions. We’ll keep a list of companies using the neighborhood boundaries here.