Welcome to St. Louis Real Estate Insights Sign in | Help

St. Louis Real Estate Insights

Thoughts about real estate and the St. Louis Region by Karen Goodman
Find the Most Wealthy (and Poverty Stricken) Parts of Town in ANY City

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 a page that allows you to enter a zipcode, then layer a number of "heat maps" over the community map. This page will show you the average income for various parts of the St. Louis area (NOTE: if you unclick the boxes next to bedrooms sizes, all of the properties icons will disappear and you'll get a better view of the city map).  

Have you ever been travelling 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.  

For another fun website, see also How Walkable is your Neighborhood. And, for a great graphic that shows how the St. Louis area schools compare to each other, see Which are the Best Schools in St. Louis and St. Charles?

Karen Goodman
www.RealEstateInfoSTL.com

Posted: Monday, February 11, 2008 4:22 PM by Karen Goodman

Comments

Drew Meyers said:

Karen-

Glad you are following the Geek Estate Blog! So, do you like zilpy or hotpads better?

# February 11, 2008 4:33 PM

Karen Goodman said:

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?

# February 11, 2008 9:28 PM

St. Louis Real Estate Insights said:

I don't know about you, but I find myself out & about with my laptop along quite often. Most

# February 17, 2008 9:25 AM

St. Louis Real Estate Insights said:

I've been working with buyers relocating to the St. Louis area for years, and I find that many people

# February 29, 2008 11:16 PM

St. Louis Real Estate Insights said:

Verizon Wireless is offering an unlimited minutes plan that might save you money. Just to let you know...I

# March 14, 2008 8:01 AM

St. Louis Real Estate Insights said:

With gas prices so ridiculously high, you should consider taking advantage of the many fun, free events

# May 31, 2008 10:12 AM
Leave a Comment

(required) 

(required) 

(optional)

(required) 

 

Comment Notification

Subscribe to this post's comments using RSS