Brief Overall Description of the Dataset:
Real Estate: The data are an aggregate of real estate agents, tourism agencies, municipality information, and ongoing customer feedback to maponics. “We are the recognized market leader in providing geospatial data to both commercial and residential real estate markets. Over 70% of the top real estate websites use Maponics' data to enable search for properties within specific neighborhoods, school attendance zones, or ZIP Codes. Plus, influential businesses such as Fannie Mae, Black Knight Financial Services, Realtors Property Resource, and Hanley Wood have made Maponics the data standard for much of the back-end technology that drives real estate valuation and analytics.” If needed GIS boundary data (parcels/school districts), can buy here.
Walkability: The data are an aggregate of real estate agents, tourism agencies, municipality information, and ongoing customer feedback to maponics. Maponics goal is to provide a holistic picture of specific geographies, which will emerge with planned data additions to relating to daily and leisure activities, social sentiment, and environmental variables. “Walkability covers 154,000 neighborhoods in over 4,000 cities across the United States, versus just 10,000+ neighborhoods in less than 3,000 cities covered by Walk Score.”
Real estate data comes from a big data company (couldn't specify which) and they aggregate this data to their geographic unit of analysis.
The do not have data in census tract form.
Link: http://www.maponics.com/products/context/real-estate-inventory
Date Inventory Completed: 5/20/15
Screening
- Is the data collected opinion-based?
- Is the data collection recurring (must be collected at least annually)?
- Is there data available for 2013?
- Is the data collected at the property or housing unit level?
- Can we access the data by August 15th?
Purpose
What is the purpose of the organization collecting the data?
Maponics is a for-profit data selling company.
Why is it collected and how does the organization use it?
Maponics Context is intended for businesses that want to be able to target specific areas, demographics, “Local Character,” etc.
Who else uses the data?
Business, researchers
- Who do they sell the data to?
Business, researchers
Method
What is the data collection method?
The data are an aggregate of real estate agents, tourism agencies, municipality information, and ongoing customer feedback to maponics. The manner in which they got this data is unclear. It seems as though their data is non-original but they have compiled and cleaned many other data sources as well as provided some of their own analysis.
What is the type of data collected?
The data is a combination of designed collection, administrative data, and digital data.
If designed, who created the questions?
What is the raw source of the collected data (prior to any aggregation)?
At least one of their sources is the Census but it is unclear how much derives from that. The real estate inventory, along with a couple of their other products also include estimates from their proprietarily owned data.
Are a middle man for real estate data
Description
What is the general topic of the data (1-2 words)?
Households (Owner Occupancy Ratio, Years of Ownership, Average/Median Bed, Bath, Sq Ft, Assessed Values, Property Type Breakdown, Top 3 Area Lenders, and Conformity) and local context (demographics, prizm, crime, weather, commuting, school districts)
What are the earliest and latest dates for which data is available?
It is unclear how far back the dataset goes.
Is data collected and available periodically?
Not stated
How soon after a reference period ends can a data source be prepared and provided?
Not stated
Selectivity
What is the universe (e.g., population) that the data represents?
The context real-estate data at least covers the United States but the Maponics service at large claims to cover much broader than that.
Accessibility
How is the data accessed?
Reports, Spatial API
Is it open data?
No
Any legal, regulatory, or administrative restrictions on accessing the data source?
Cost? - One time or annual or project based payment?
For the two counties for 1 year, ~$13,000 for real estate and ~$8,000 for the rest
Does this dataset appear to meet our needs for the Census study? No
Explanation:
Data is unavailable in census tract form (smallest is mail route carrier).