| Mother Necessity Helped Us Build Neighborhood Insights |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 10.10.2007 | |
This is a big day at HousingIntelligence. Today we are turning on a powerful new application that is the culmination of years of frustration and scratching our heads about how to get good and consistent housing intelligence for every market of interest down to the neighborhood level. As they taught us in elementary school and on School House Rock, necessity is the mother of invention. To the thinking of serious housing professionals like us, we are in severe need of better and more comprehensive housing intelligence. Move over Thomas Edison.When I was responsible for strategic planning at one of the largest builders in the country, I struggled with the fact that we could not get consistent information on every market we were in or wanted to be in. We had to work with a collection of national, regional and local firms, and we lacked information on “smaller” markets. Never mind that not a single market we were trying to study fell out of the top 75 MSAs in the country. I feel sorry for anyone trying to make decisions about housing outside of the top 75 MSAs. Next, when we could find data we were often limited to just quasi-MSA coverage or county-level information. There are premium providers of new home information in the largest markets that will sell you information at the builder and community level, but besides being extremely expensive, they didn’t cover existing home sales, which are the number one competitive substitute for new homes. Finally, we dreamed of having information not just about prices, beds, baths, and square footage, but also about the customers who were buying. We developed sophisticated ways of segmenting home buyers to help target product offerings, but we had no way of studying who was buying in neighboring communities. When we started BlueSmoke, we found out a few national data providers didn’t like selling their data to researchers, so we were forced to explore a better way just to deliver quality research and analysis. The final push to build something ourselves came this time last year when a client asked us to help figure out who was buying from an existing community of a competitor so they could determine if there would be enough demand for a new community. No one provided that sort of intelligence. That client question led us on a journey through a myriad of data sources to find the right partners who could help us design and build what has become Neighborhood Insights. What is Neighborhood Insights? In short, it’s a multidimensional online application that allows users to analyze housing trends, covering both new and existing home sales and including buyer profiles, down to the neighborhood level for over 275 markets across the U.S. For more detail, visit our FAQs and watch our short presentation demo. As a testament to what it can do, we’ve been using the data behind Neighborhood Insights in projects that we've completed for clients over the last six months. If you are serious about understanding housing trends, we think you will find no other resource quite like it. While I am one proud parent, I will acknowledge that this is a 1.0 application. We plan to enhance and build this platform based on the demand and interests of our HousingIntelligence community. Let us know what you think! And do us a favor and tell all of your fellow housing professionals about it—we’ve got some mighty big data license and development costs to cover. 
We're always looking for feedback from our readers.
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