Serving 4 Million+ Scores Daily

Here are some fun facts from a remarkable 2011:

• Launched the world’s first apartment search by commute time
• 10,000+ sites using our Neighborhood Map
• 100 million views of the Neighborhood Map
• Showing 4 million+ scores per day
• Ranked 2,500 U.S. cities on walkability
• And launched the Neighborhood Flyer, Commute Reports, mobile sites, and too many other features to count.

 

Matt Lerner Named 100 Most Influential People in Real Estate

Matt Named One of the 100 Most Influential People in Real Estate

We were honored that our co-founder and CTO Matt Lerner was named one of the 100 most influential people in real estate by Inman News.

Happy New Year From Walk Score!

You can now search for apartments by neighborhood with Walk Score’s Apartment Search.

Try it out! Just search for your favorite neighborhood, like French Quarter, New Orleans. Once in “neighborhood mode” you can mouse over the map and click the neighborhood outline to add or remove it to your search area.

There’s also a “Neighborhoods” menu option, so you can enable ‘hoods at any point in an apartment search and view a list of neighborhood names to choose from.

Want to see our new neighborhood search in action? Watch this video:

Wish you could spend less time in your car? Our new Apartment Search features are for you!

Search by Multiple Commute Times

Just six weeks ago we launched apartment search by commute time. Now we’ve added the ability to search by multiple commutes.

Let’s say you bike to work downtown and your spouse or roommate takes the bus to school.  Walk Score finds apartments that optimize the commute of everyone in your home.  See an example commute search.

Find Apartments Near Transit

Want to find an apartment within walking distance of the subway or the express bus that goes to your office?

No problem, with our new “Near Transit” search option you can select the transit route that you’d like to live near and how far you’re willing to walk to the stop. See transit search in action.

Search by Walk Score

Whether you want to be in the heart of it all, or just don’t want to have to drive to get a cup of coffee, Apartment Search now includes the ability to search by Walk Score.

Select the Walk Score search filter and click Walker’s Paradise to find only Walk Score 90+ apartments. See Walker’s Paradise apartments in Seattle.

Did you know:

• The longer your commute, the more likely you are to be overweight, have high cholesterol and suffer from neck/back pain (Source: Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index)
• Car ownership costs are the second largest household expense in the U.S. The average household spends more on their cars than they do on food and health care. (Source: Dept. of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• People who live in walkable neighborhoods are happier, healthier and more likely to volunteer and entertain friends at home (Source: University of New Hampshire)

We often hear from customers who use Walk Score to help them decide where to stay when traveling. Are they choosing a hotel, B&B or vacation rental in a convenient location with restaurants, coffee shops, entertainment and other amenities within walking distance? Do they need to budget for taxis, a rental car and hotel parking, or is the location well served by public transportation?

Now, thanks to innovative team at Hipmunk, you can search for hotels and Airbnb listings by Walk Score!

Search for Hotels by Walk Score with Hipmunk

It’s a great implementation with a custom Walk Score heatmap so you can see which neighborhoods are more walkable. And, when this heatmap is active, hotels and Airbnb listings are automatically sorted by Walk Score. You can also view the Walk Score of each property on the hotel’s neighborhood tab. Know before you go!

Find a hotel's Walk Score

Now, with Walk Score Apartment Search you can search for apartments by commute time.

Whether you prefer driving, public transit, walking, or biking, Walk Score can help you find a commute that fits your lifestyle.

Commuting is expensive and time spent sitting in traffic is lost forever. Here are our favorite commuting stats:

• Over three quarters of home shoppers rate being within a 30 minute commute to work as important. (Source: National Association of Realtors)
• Commuters waste 4.2 billion hours and 2.8 billion gallons of gas in traffic per year. (Source: Texas Transportation Institute)
• The average American spends over $9,000 per year on their car. This is the equivalent of a $135,000 mortgage and the second largest expense for most households, costing more than food, clothing and health care. (Source: AAA)

To get started, visit walkscore.com/apartments and enter your work (or school) address, select your preferred mode of transportation, and tell us how long you’re willing to commute.

Apartment listings from craigslist are automatically sorted by estimated commute time and can be further filtered by Walk Score, price and size.

And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, we’ve integrated links to MyNewPlace and ForRent.com to search their national databases for nearby rental listings.

“Access to public transit and minimizing commute times are high-priority, quality of life issues for many renters. We’re very pleased to offer Walk Score users access to MyNewPlace’s extensive inventory of apartments and rental homes in virtually every neighborhood throughout the U.S.,” said Mark Moran, MyNewPlace SVP of Marketing.

Here’s a demo:

Find a better commute today!

Commuting costs are rising with gas prices – so it’s no wonder 75% of potential home buyers want to live within a 30 minute commute to work¹!

We just added commute costs to our Commute Map so you can help your site visitors understand how much their commute will cost in terms of time and money.

Now you can display a commute map and commute cost calculator on your website.

Try it out on our Commute Demo page and then sign up to get started.

Here are the details of how we’re calculating commute costs.  Did you know transportation is the second largest expense for American households²?

Today we’re announcing a free Walk Score WordPress Plugin that makes it easy to showcase the location of a property in your WordPress blog.

Once you install the plugin, you can embed our Neighborhood Map in any post by typing a shortcode like this:

[walk-score-map address="3503 NE 45th St. Seattle WA 98105"]

 
The  shortcode above will display a map like this:

 

 
Give it a try and then rate our plugin on the WordPress site!

WordPress Trivia: Did you know WordPress powers 22 out of every 100 new websites in the United States? Wow!

Today we’re announcing our 2011 ranking of America’s Most Walkable Cities and Neighborhoods! Read the official press release.

View the full list and vote on what you think are the most walkable cities

New York vs. San Francisco

New York eked out a lead over San Francisco, which was the most walkable city in our 2008 rankings but, before you get too cocky New York, you’re only ahead by .4 points.

This is such a close race that we’ve built a user voting system so you can tell us which city you think is most walkable!

Cast your vote now by clicking “Like.”

And remember, we use the official city borders from the census.  So when you rate the walkability of NYC, you have to include Staten Island!

Explore the walkability of 2,500 cities

We also calculated the Walk Score of 2,500 cities and over 10,000 neighborhoods in the United States.  Our new map view lets you explore cities by Walk Score, population, and region.

Walk Score distribution graphs for neighborhoods in Atlanta, GA

• The 2011 rankings use the latest 2010 population data from the U.S. census and neighborhood boundaries from Zillow
• Read a detailed description of the methodology used in our rankings
• Learn about using Walk Score data for research and planning

We’re excited to announce that now over 10,000 real estate websites are now using Walk Score Professional. This represents a 250% increase over the past year. Read the official press release.

Now Serving 4 Million Scores Daily

Walk Score Professional real estate marketing tools include:

• The Walk Score Neighborhood Map: An interactive map widget that includes nearby amenities, commute times, and public transit.
• The Walk Score Neighborhood Flyer: A low-cost way to showcase the location of a property, the Neighborhood Flyer is easy to customize, share online and print for clients.
• Walk Score APIs: Enable software developers to integrate Walk Score and public transit data into their web and mobile applications.

“Walk Score is helping us to better meet REALTOR® and consumer demand for walkable places to live,” said Russ Bergeron, CEO of MRED, the nation’s largest MLS.  “Serving the Chicagoland area we know how important walkability is to the people who live here – whether they are in downtown Chicago, or in a small town like Naperville. When given the choice, most people prefer to be within walking distance of public transportation, restaurants, shops, and other local businesses.  And with gas prices at current levels, walkable neighborhoods and shorter commutes have become even more important.”

Thanks from the Walk Score team to all of our partners who helped us hit this milestone!

We’re excited to announce that Walk Score has received Part 2 of a grant from Active Living Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

We will be working with Dr. Lawrence Frank and Urban Design 4 Health to continue to align Walk Score with the latest research on urban design, walkability, and health. Specifically, we will enhance Walk Score to include more pedestrian friendliness metrics and to increase the correlation between Walk Score and on-the-ground walking behavior.

Why does this matter? One of our goals is to promote research on walkable neighborhoods by providing a cost-effective national walkability metric.  We hope that by increasing the accuracy of Walk Score, we can make our data more useful to researchers.

In Phase 1 of our grant, we developed Street Smart Walk Score and Walk Score was found by Urban Design 4 Health ”to be strongly and significantly correlated with an already validated measure of walkability.”

Who uses Walk Score data? Walk Score data is used by leading researchers and city planning departments including CEOs for Cities and the Washington DC Office of Planning.

We’re the first to admit that Walk Score isn’t perfect—so we look forward to adding more “street smarts” to Walk Score with this grant!