Online property search has improved considerably over the years, but the team at Onboard Informatics feels we still have much room for improvement. More specifically, rather than limiting online searchers to traditional criteria (such as price, number of beds/baths, and square footage), we should also be helping them with something just as important: helping evaluate where they want to live. It's a valid point; after all, how many times have you seen a buyer compromise on price in order to live in their desired neighborhood? You can add value by holding their hand as they discover this desired neighborhood, and then transition them easily to looking at specific listings in the area with your traditional property search.

Neighborhood Navigator from Onboard Informatics is a plug-and-play tool for real estate brokers who want to offer prospective buyers an improved online property search experience on their consumer-facing website. The functionality is focused on providing data about a specific neighborhood and offering comparisons to other areas. The upside for brokers is increased time on site, repeat visits, and cementing that "neighborhood expert" role. The benefits for consumers are numerous, as you can see from our walk-through of the product.

Try It Yourself

Onboard Informatics has made it really easy for you to experiment with this product. You can try it for yourself here. We suggest this as more than just a way to get a hands-on experience with the tool. It's also important to look at a countywide snapshot of your area and assess the neighborhood data available. While Onboard Informatics remains at the very top of the data "game" in real estate, it's a Herculean task to look both nationally and locally and achieve 100% accuracy on the fine nuances of both.

You can also check out a few of the sites that currently use Neighborhood Navigator to see the different implementation options: Better Homes & Gardens Real Estate (you'll need to enter a city or a zip code), Mel Foster Co. Real Estate (see the "Neighborhood" tab on this property details page), and Lyon Real Estate. We'll talk more about implementation a little later on.

Basic Functionality

The data in Neighborhood Navigator focuses around four key areas: community information (an overview of demographics, crime, weather, cost of living, etc.), school information, nearby establishments, and home values. Let's look at each of these more closely.

Community Information

The Community Overview provides an exceptional snapshot of the community, with the data that matters to prospective buyers in an easy-to-understand format. Factors such as Housing Inventory, Housing Stability, Population Demographics, Climate and Weather, Educational Climate, Workforce (white collar vs. blue collar), Income, Crime and much more are considered.

You can also compare neighborhoods. Users can evaluate their current residence versus a prospective location or look at how a zip code or neighborhood stacks compared to the overall entire city. This feature offers the opportunity for some unique insights, as you can see in the example below (the differences in years of residency and housing inventory was particularly interesting in this comparison).

School Information

This information offers startling depth of insight into the quality of local schools. You can see a list of all local schools and obtain more information about each of them, including:

• Reviews/ratings from real parents or students provided by GreatSchools
  
• Test scores (with comparisons to the overall school district and the state)
  

Nearby Establishments

Discover nearby businesses for eating/drinking, shopping, attractions/recreation, banks, education, hospitality, automotive services, pet services, and more. See how close each of these is to get an idea of how "walkable" a neighborhood might be.

Home Values

The Home Values section of Neighborhood Navigator looks at home sales trends in the recent past.

By entering a specific property address in the Home Values section, users can also look at specific recent nearby transactions and get a home value estimate.

Implementation

Onboard Informatics focuses on providing premier customer service. This means offering a wide range of implementation options for Neighborhood Navigator. The best plan is to call their team to explain your objectives – they can then offer the best implementation solution for you. The options are numerous, from a simple piece of code that will link out to Onboard's site, to a completely custom implementation such as a new tab in a listing details page. No matter how you choose to incorporate Neighborhood Navigator into your site, the Onboard team will customize it to match your brokerage logo and colors.

A Note on Data Sources

Onboard Informatics is established as a data leader in the real estate space. To provide the deep, accurate data for Neighborhood Navigator, Onboard Informatics cleans and filters hundreds of data sources from national sources like the Census, FBI and Bureau of Labor Statistics to local Assessor, Clerk, and Chambers of Commerce to various commercial partners such as GreatSchools. Hover over the "FAQ" section within Neighborhood Navigator for specific details on individual reports.

Next Steps

• Try it yourself!
• Learn more about Onboard Informatics in our product directory or at OnboardInformatics.com.
• Read articles about lifestyle search and website/blog plugins.
• Discover additional products.