These shocking statistics underline what parents around the country already know.  Access to a high quality education is not a given.  Ensuring children get one requires shrewd decision making on behalf of parents.  This is never truer than when families find themselves re-locating to a new home, whether in the next town over or across the country.

Until recently, evaluating school options when searching for real estate was a frustrating and time-intensive task.  Which is why it is encouraging to see companies like Estately (see last week’s blog post) leveraging Maponics School Boundaries to develop school comparison tools.  Tools like these let home buyers quickly weigh school options (including GreatSchools ranking) relative to property locations. This empowers parents to make the wisest choices for their children’s future.

The image below shows homes that fall within the school attendance zone for Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington.

In addition to school boundaries, Maponics also offers neighborhood, subdivision, and ZIP Code boundaries that are ideal for Real Estate and local search sites. Read our announcement this week on the expansion of our neighborhood and subdivision boundaries to more than 300,000 here.

Interested in learning more? Contact us today at info@maponics.com or call 1-800-762-5158

In local, most companies are still playing with cities and states as the base of their main keywords.  For example, every yellow pages site out there has a URL called “New York City Restaurants” but not nearly as many are targeting neighborhood-specific queries.  If you search Google right now, you’ll see about 1.2MM URLs in its index that target “New York City Restaurants”, but only about 4,000 that target “Tribeca Restaurants”.  And if you looked for URLs that targeted similar queries for zip codes or nearby landmarks, you would see similar small numbers.

So what does this mean to you?  One of the keys to playing the long-tail local SEO game is to expand your “keyword footprint” by providing URLs on your site that target niche queries such as neighborhood and zip code searches.  And the fewer sites that target these queries, the easier it is to rank well for them.  Now it can be tricky to add that much content to your site and get it indexed and ranked properly, but if you do not have the content, you have no chance of ranking.

In mobile, we are seeing Google in particular showing results in tighter and tighter clusters around the location of the mobile browser.  This means that to rank well for mobile queries your website/URL needs to be showing signals to Google that it is in fact close to the location of the person with the phone.  One way to do this is to use highly specific keywords that reference the desired location such as a neighborhood.

While SEO is an ever-evolving game, if you don’t have the data, you’re not even in the ballpark.

LocalSEOGuide is Andrew Shotland’s blog about local search engine optimization and local marketing trends.  Andrew provides “national” and local seo services to enterprise-level sites, startups and small businesses around the world.

We’ve continued to innovate in this arena and have delivered a truly unique dataset.  Subdivisions represent the fundamental unit of geography for the residential real estate landscape.  But, until now, the real estate industry has had no reliable and systematic source for subdivision boundary data.  With wide scale coverage across the U.S., subdivision boundaries support a host of real estate services aimed at both consumers and real estate professionals that improve:

• search and display
• interactive mapping
• trend and analytics reporting
• automated valuation models

I think Darrin Clement, our CEO, said it best when he said:

“Subdivision Boundaries is an excellent example of automation, GIS expertise, and a focus on quality coming together to create a product that addresses a fundamental industry need.  I’m extremely proud of our team for developing an innovative approach that not only represents significant intellectual property, but also enables us to respond quickly to customer requests for geographic coverage and provide a new set of custom polygon services.”

For current geographic coverage details or information, Contact us.

Click here to request Sample Subdivision Boundary Data.

While previous product releases included school district and school attendance zone (SAZ) boundaries for the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), we knew from working with local school officials that they were planning a major overhaul at the SAZ level.  As a result, we’ve incorporated the entire set of changes (more than 100 SAZs) soon after they were announced.

The SFUSD educates half a million students in 170 schools.  For SFUSD, school attendance zones play an important part in determining how students are assigned to schools.  While in part of the district, a student application process is used, SFUSD uses their school attendance zones as a foundation to:

• balance demographic diversity by school
• ensure equitable access to educational opportunities
• provide transparency to the student assignment process

This is just one example of how our team here at Maponics is on the case to ensure your data reflects the world around us.  Contact us to get a sample of our School Boundaries data.

We all know that the number of online and mobile resources for real estate search have proliferated in recent years but it takes consumers time to change their habits and adopt new technology.  It appears that Web resources are now firmly embedded as the primary way for people to search for residential real estate—in fact more than 80% of respondents reported using online tools.

In a story written by the Philadelphia Inquirer about the survey, they point out that the number one online resource for real estate search were property portals and noted that “The big three among these sites were Realtor.com (64 percent), Zillow (61 percent), and Trulia (51 percent).”

We are of course pleased that the top sites all leverage Maponics location datasets to enhance search capability and provide local geographic context for areas such as neighborhood, school and ZIP Code Boundaries.  Visit our customer use case pages to read about how one of these companies uses our data.

And this summer, we will begin offering a first-of-its kind dataset containing subdivision boundaries across major metro areas.  Read more about Subdivision Boundaries.

From our Subdivision Boundaries announcement:

In suburban settings, the smallest defined area around properties is typically the subdivision—which can include everything from a few homes within a gated community to a development with hundreds of properties.  The real estate industry has long recognized that the immediate area surrounding properties significantly impacts quality of life and home values.

In the Inquirer article, they also note that driving through neighborhoods is still a common house hunting practice, although people now use online resources to winnow the list of properties they visit—saving money and precious time.  The good news here is that in addition to using our data to enhance their web sites, many of our customers also embed our data in their mobile apps to provide enhanced location context for home buyers on the go.

For more ideas about how mobile real estate apps could add cool new features based on Maponics geofences, check out this article on Directions Magazine.

“With the integration of the Maponics ZIP+4 Database, the results are incredibly reliable and precise, arming our customers with the ability to accurately target their marketing efforts using our integrated radius and donut-radius select capabilities.  The ZIP+4 match rate to precise Latitude and Longitude coordinate using our CASS Certified® engine with Maponics ZIP+4 Database is simply astounding. “

Check out the entire customer use case with screen shots here.

How can we help you improve your marketing campaigns?  Contact us.

So, what is the easiest way to enable search and filtering by ZIP Code on your web site?
The Maponics API.

Once registered, you’ll be issued a key that you pass along with data requests from your site to our API server. You can pass one or more parameters to the API server and use a variety of public methods depending on the use case. Here are a few common methods:

Using the methods above, developers can return 5 digit ZIP Codes, 3 digit ZIP Codes, ZIP Code centroids, postal town name and more.

Contact us to sign up for a free API trial.

Other posts in this series:

Maponics Spatial API
API: Global Neighborhood Boundaries
API: School Attendance Zones

Recently, we added a part of the SAZ dataset to the Maponics Spatial API.  The SAZ dataset on the API allows requests that include a latitude and longitude coordinate pair. The API spatially determines the school/schools that those coordinates are within, and then return a list of attributes for related the school/schools.

Attributes returned include:

• Maponics ID
• NCES School District ID
• NCES School ID
• School Name
• Level of education (P=Primary, M=Middle, H=High, O=Other- mixed grades)

For more about the public method that can be used against the SAZ dataset, see: getGeoAttByCoord.

The most common use case for this dataset is to simply pass one or more coordinates for residential properties to the API in order to obtain their associated public schools.  Of course, there are many more use cases.  To read about them and the features of the full dataset, visit our School Boundaries page.

Read additional posts in this blog series below:
API: Global Neighborhood Boundaries
Maponics Spatial API

The neighborhood dataset available on our API is truly unique in its size and scope.  As of the end of 2010, it contained more than 138,000 neighborhoods in thousands of cities across the globe.  That makes it the largest database of neighborhood boundary definitions ever compiled.

Here is a summary of the data available in this extensive neighborhood dataset:

• Neighborhood Name
• Neighborhood Boundary
• Neighborhood Centroid
• Neighborhood Classification*
• Country
• County
• CBSA
• MCD
• Place

*- Data available for a subset of records.

With the combination of core data fields that contain neighborhood information along with geographic reference information (e.g. Metro) about where the neighborhood is, this dataset offers a comprehensive geo stack for developers looking to add social and cultural context.

See full dataset details here.

Developers can use a variety of methods to access neighborhood data through the API.  They can be broken down into methods that:

• return attributes of spatial objects (getGeoAtt)
• return an ID of a single spatial object (getGeoID)
• return a list of IDs for multiple spatial objects (getGeoList)
• return geographic coordinates of spatial objects (getGeoPoly)

In terms of input parameters, requests can include a simple coordinate pair (lat/lon) per request or a batch of coordinates within a single request.

With such an extensive dataset and the numerous methods to access it, the Maponics Spatial API represents a powerful addition to the developer’s toolkit.

Contact us if you would like to set up a trial for the Maponics Spatial API.