by Johanna Hunter, Product Manger on June 10, 2011 at 11:16AM
Last week, we released our latest version of School Boundaries—a unique datasets that now includes school attendance zone boundaries for more than 65,000 public schools in 15,500 cities and towns across the U.S. In addition to updating existing coverage to ensure it reflects the latest changes made at the local level, we expanded coverage in existing major metros. One important update I wanted to call out was in San Francisco, CA.
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.
by Steve DuScheid, Marketing Director on May 6, 2011 at 4:05PM
The results of a recent survey commissioned by Prudential Fox & Roach REALTORS® confirm conventional wisdom: the Web is the dominate tool of choice for house hunters.
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.
