Zillow: There Goes the Neighborhood, Free

They’re giving away data on neighborhood boundaries. See the Zillow blog post here:

The boundary lines for over 7,000 neighborhoods around the United States covering roughly 150 cities. These neighborhood shapes are now available, zipped up in the Arc Shapefile format, for anyone to download….

So, after all this work, why are we giving this data away for free? Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of neighborhoods will result in some great innovation that we’re excited to check out. Real estate is local — and neighborhoods are a great way to look at real estate on a local level. We’re particularly excited to see what companies and individual techies can come up with, who may not have the budget to license this data from other data providers. There is almost limitless possibilities in terms of mashing up GIS data — for instance, you could easily overlay earthquake zones and tag a neighborhoods’ likelihood of experiencing an earthquake.

Urban Mapping is doing something similar and developing other, enhanced data as well. What this does is improve the local user experience on destination sites. But, as with Urban Mapping’s GeoMods, it also potentially improves local ad targeting.

Thanks for the tip, Jeremy.