Real estate listings in Japan show the walking distance to the nearest subway station.

Below is a screenshot from the front page of Yahoo! Real Estate in Japan.  See the big picture of a train?

Picking the subway line or subway station near where you’d like to live is the primary way to search for a home or apartment on many Japanese real estate websites.  Picking the subway line comes before picking your price range, before picking the number of bedrooms, before picking a neighborhood, etc.  Exotic, isn’t it?!

Search by Subway Line - Front Page of Yahoo! Real Estate Japan

Here I’ve selected the Yamanote line to search for properties.  Real estate near the Yamanote line is desirable and expensive (more on why below).

Now I can select the subway stations on the Yamanote line where I’d like to search for real estate.

Search for Properties by Subway Station

Now I see the list of properties near the subway stations I’ve selected.

And drum roll please…  each property shows the walking distance to the nearest subway station!

In fact, my Japanese sources (pictured at the bottom of this post) tell me that the walking distance to the nearest subway station is the thing they look at first on a real estate listing.

Property Listings Show Walking Distance to Subway Stations

What is Transit-Oriented Development?

Transit-oriented development (TOD) is mixed-use residential and commercial development designed to maximize access to public transit.  TOD is a hot topic among urban planners right now—but Japan has been doing it for decades!

Why did Japanese real estate evolve this way? It turns out that Japanese rail companies built their subway lines on land they already owned—and these same companies developed the real estate around the subway lines. This ensured that there were enough people within walking distance of the subway.  In other words, the subway lines and real estate were developed together… which is exactly transit-oriented development!

An interesting side effect of this process is that the companies who built the subway lines tended to develop similar real estate along the entire line.  For example, a luxury company would develop high-end real estate along their subway line.  This is why real estate on the Yamanote line is considered desirable and is expensive—it was developed to be luxurious!  Imagine if people in the Bay Area said, “I’ve always wanted to live on the Pittsburgh / Bay Point line.  The real estate along that line is really choice.”

Public Transit on U.S. Real Estate Listings

As more cities in the U.S. benefit from transit-oriented development (like the Seattle light rail that is being extended as I type this) we expect to see more real estate listings showing nearby transit.

Walk Score has already helped hundreds of real estate sites show nearby public transit on their listings and we’re considering making our public transit data available via an API.  Contact us if you’re interested in showing public transit on your site.

Thanks to Takeshi and Yasuo from NHK TV in Japan who came to our offices to interview us about Walk Score—little did they know I was going to interview them about Japanese real estate!

I’m @mrlerner on Twitter.

Washington D.C. is emerging as a leader in the car-lite lifestyle.   12% of residents walk to work and 1 million people ride the train daily.

Harriet Tregoning is the Director of the Office of Planning for Washington D.C.  Last month at the New Partners for Smart Growth Conference she gave the following presentation on how D.C. is using Walk Score as an urban planning metric.

Here’s a surprising fact about “green” buildings: transportation to a building accounts for twice as much energy as operating the building¹.

USA Today reports that only one of the six green-home award winners picked by the U.S. Green Building Council has a Walk Score higher than 50.

Can a home or office really be green if the only way to get there is by car?

Kudos to Kaid Benfield at NRDC for saying it best here:

One result is that the added environmental benefit of the residences’ laudable green features will be offset by the environmental damage caused by the sites’ automobile dependence, poor environment for walking, and relative distance from jobs, shops and services.  Another result is that the public, the building industry, and policy makers will continue to be misled about how best to achieve true environmental performance in our built environment.

MyNewPlace, the second most trafficked apartment and home rentals Web site in the U.S., now makes it easy to find the most walkable apartments for rent in your city.

And when you look up an address on the Walk Score site you now have 1-click access to see nearby apartments for rent on MyNewPlace, sorted by Walk Score!

“With the addition of search by Walk Score rating, MyNewPlace may be the ‘greenest’ apartment site on the Web, “said Mike Mathieu, founder of Front Seat, makers of Walk Score. “The easiest way to save money on transportation and lower your environmental impact is to move to a more walkable neighborhood and that is attractive to many renters.”

Sort by Walk Score on MyNewPlace:

Search results show their Walk Score in the summary:

Walk Score now links to nearby Walkable Rentals from MyNewPlace:

Widget!
We also built a widget with MyNewPlace that you can put on your own site to help your visitors find walkable apartments.

Get this widget for your site!

“A recent MyNewPlace survey indicated 79 percent of renters believe neighborhood information is an important factor when deciding on a particular apartment over another,” said Mark Moran, vice president of marketing for MyNewPlace. “Utilizing leading-edge walkability technology available from Walk Score allows us to provide prospects with an in-depth feel for a neighborhood thereby making them a more qualified lead for landlords.”

A big thanks to all the folks at MyNewPlace for all their great work on helping to promote walkable neighborhoods!

We’ve now added transit data from 80+ agencies to Walk Score as part of our grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

While adding transit to Walk Score we realized there was a larger opportunity to:

1. Highlight all the great apps that use public transit data
2. Show which transit agencies do and don’t provide open data to software developers

Announcing City-Go-Round

So today we’re launching a new site called City-Go-Round where you can search for innovative transit apps and websites in your city. You can also check whether your transit agency provides open data.

Find apps in your city:
www.CityGoRound.org

Read the City-Go-Round press release.

These Apps are Rad

We had no idea how many innovative transit apps were already out there.  Here are some of our favorites:

One Bus Away: Find out exactly where your bus is in Seattle.  Check City-Go-Round to see if your city has a real-time arrival app.

Acrossair: Hold your iPhone up to see augmented-reality transit maps.  Whoa, the future is now.

Exit Strategy NYC: Perhaps the most creative app we’ve seen, Exit Strategy NYC shows you where to stand so you can get out of the subway station faster!

A huge thank you to Benjamin de la Peña and team at the Rockefeller Foundation for supporting City-Go-Round and public transit on Walk Score.

Less than one week after we launched transit on Walk Score, 3 new transit agencies have opened their data and are now live on Walk Score:

• Cleveland, OH Regional Transit Authority
• Kansas City, MO KCATA
• San Diego, CA North County Transit District

Kudos to these forward-looking transit agencies!

But get this… Over 400+ transit agencies have made their public transit feeds available to Google—but only 40+ have made that data available to the public!

Sign our petition to open up transit data.

Transit in Cleveland, OH

The Local Market Explorer plugin from Zillow is a simple way to add data from Walk Score, Education.com, and Zillow to your blog—and it just got better.

Zillow just released version 2 of the Local Market Explorer.  Improvements include support for neighborhoods and ZIPs, video embedding, and easier customization.

Download version 2 of the Local Market Explorer plugin here or read more on the Zillow blog.

Check out these sample pages on the Geek Estate Blog:

• Pearl District, Portland, OR
• Upper Eastside, New York, NY
• Los Angeles, CA

Enjoy!

ZipRealty, LPS Real Estate Group (formerly FNRES and Cyberhomes), Windermere, San Francisco Chronicle, and hundreds of other real estate sites that use the Walk Score Real Estate Tile are now showing nearby public transit powered by Walk Score.

Read the press release.

And—you guessed it—we also added transit to WalkScore.com:

How does it work?

• Walk Score gets data from transit agencies that publish a public Google Transit Feed.
• Currently, there are about 40 public transit feeds and we’ll automatically add new ones as they’re published.
• We show you the nearest rail stops followed by bus, ferries, funiculars, cable cars… you get the idea.

Not only is transit a key component of the car-lite lifestyle, but homes near transit may be better investments.

In Denver, homes within 1/2 mile of light rail appreciated more than 17% while the overall Denver housing market fell more than 7%.  Colorado residents can see transit powered by Walk Score on ColoProperty and REcolorado.

Does nearby transit affect your Walk Score? We’re working on it!  Visit WalkScore.Org to join the discussion. 

Does your city provide a public transit feed? Transit on Walk Score is a great example of the value of open government data.  If you live in a city that publishes a public transit feed, send your transit agency flowers and a thank you note.

If you live in a city that doesn’t publish a public transit feed, ask them to make public transit data public.

Public transit on Walk Score is funded by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

With Halloween fast approaching, it’s important for trick-or-treaters young and old to know where to score the best candy. Walk Score is proud to be one of four criteria Zillow used to put together a handy list of the 5 best Trick-or-Treat neighborhoods in Seattle. The other equally weighted factors are Zillow’s home value index, population density and local crime data.

So which neighborhoods rank highest? Wallingford (90), Queen Anne (81),  Magnolia (61), University District (94) and Capitol Hill (87).

Check out the Walk Scores for all 77 Seattle neighborhoods.

We’re very excited to announce that Windermere Real Estate is now showing Walk Score on all their website listings.

Windermere is a great Seattle success story and is ranked as the largest independent real estate company in the West, with more than 300 offices and 8,000 associates serving communities in Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, Washington and British Columbia.  Windermere’s website attracts nearly 1 1/2 million visitors each month to view detailed home listings.  Windermere.com is displaying the Walk Score Tile on all listings, such as this beautiful Wallingford neighborhood home in Seattle.  Thanks to the online team at Windermere for their online leadership and use of Walk Score!