A Website That Tells You Which Neighborhood is Best (For You)

• June 29, 2009

by Mark Wellborn

NeighborhoodScout has been around for awhile, but in this era of job uncertainty and frequent relocation, we took a look at the website to see what services it offered.

The site is a search engine aimed mainly at home buyers who are relocating. The way it works is pretty simple: a user types in their current address and the city to which they are moving, and NeighorhoodScout pinpoints the neighborhoods in the new city that are most similar to the area from which he/she is moving.

We entered a DC address and were given the median home value for the area, the percentage of homes on the market in various price points, and the real estate appreciation rates for the zip code. Information on public schools, crime rate estimates and the chances of being a victim of a crime were also provided.

To really test how well it worked, we chose a few cities in different regions of the country to see which DC neighborhoods the site would choose for people relocating from those places. Here are the results:

If you are moving from the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, New York, NeighborhoodScout believes that the area around 19th and R Streets in Dupont Circle is the best match for you.

If you are moving from South Beach, Miami to DC, the area around the Corcoran School of Art on 17th Street near the White House might fit you the best, according to the site.

And, if you come from the heartland city of Topeka, Kansas, then, believe it or not, Columbia Heights is the neighborhood for you.

2 Comments

1. tom veil said at 10:43 am on Tuesday June 30, 2009:

   I tried searching my own neighborhood and immediately found multiple errors:

   1. It calls my neighborhood 6th St/E St, but it shows a map of my neighborhood’s boundaries that goes from N Cap to 5th, so it doesn’t cover 6th at all.  Oh yeah, and it doesn’t cover the address that I gave.
   2. The “house value range” chart reports that 100% of the houses in my neighborhood are worth between $760k and $1,014k. 
   3. The public school tools seem to be utterly baffled by the idea of a unified school district, and cannot tell you which addresses in DC are associated with the good schools.

1. Stan said at 10:50 am on Tuesday June 30, 2009:

   Wow. As a former Topekan, I’m astonished at that match-up. I suspect folks in Columbia Heights will be, too.