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!

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!

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!

One of the most common home search criteria is, “How long does it take me to get to work?’

So why don’t real estate sites ask for your work address and then display your commute time?  We were psyched to discover this feature on ZipRealty:

Once you set up My Places, ZipRealty shows the distance from each property to work.  This helps people reduce the time they spend commuting—which means more time with friends and family and less stress.

ZipRealty is also one of the few sites that shows transit near homes:

The simplest way to reduce your carbon footprint is to live in a walkable, transit-oriented neighborhood near where you work.  With a couple of additional search features, ZipRealty could make these homes simple to find.  And this makes me wonder, is ZipRealty the greenest real estate website?

If your Walk Score is 70, is that good or bad?

We just added a “Compare Your Score” feature to Walk Score that shows how your score compares to other people in your city. Look up any address on Walk Score and you’ll see the new Compare Your Score box just under the map.

Well, I thought I was sitting pretty with a Walk Score of 95 in Seattle—but it turns out 14% of Seattlites have a higher Walk Score!

How about where I grew up in Kansas?  That house has a Walk Score of 60 and 29% of Topekans have a higher score.

Don’t tell my boss, but I just spent the last hour looking up every place I’ve lived!

Findwell is the 2nd website we know of that offers Walk Score + transit search.

Let’s pretend you’re buying a home and in addition to liking your health and the environment, you think buying a walkable house near the new Seattle light rail is a solid investment.

Simply go to findwell and search for Walk Score 90+ homes within 1/4 mile of the light rail.

Voilà!

Findwell real estate is powered by Estately real estate search.  Can you real estate platform do this?   If not, talk to Galen Ward at Estately.

Looking for a bright spot in the housing market?  CEOs for Cities just released a study based on data from Walk Score and ZipRealty that shows one point of Walk Score is worth as much as $3,000 depending on the metro area.  Read the study.

Upset about your home’s value?  The good news is that you, your neighbors, and government can work together to make your neighborhood more walkable—and a higher Walk Score makes your home worth more.

Here’s the value of one point of Walk Score by city:

In 13 out of 15 metro areas, higher Walk Scores are directly linked to higher home values.  Homes with above-average Walk Scores are worth between $4,000 – $34,000 more than similar but less walkable homes.

So why do Las Vegas and Bakersfield have lower home prices with higher Walk Scores?  My hunch is that those sprawling cities don’t have enough walkable neighborhoods to create a price premium.  Also, in Las Vegas residents may actually pay more to be farther away from The Strip.

Read the research report and let us know what you think!

Zillow just released their Local Market Explorer plugin for WordPress that provides a great overview of the home values, schools, local businesses, Walk Score, and photos of a city.

You can easily customize the plugin to turn on and off any of the following modules:

Here are live examples of the plugin for these cities:

• Atlanta
• Boston
• Houston
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• San Diego
• Seattle

Congrats to Zillow, Andrew Mattie, and Jonathan Mabe from Diverse Solutions who built this!

My first thought seeing this is that we should create a Walk Score neighborhood rankings widget for this plugin!

We’ve got two new research reports hot off the griddle that look at the effect of Walk Score on property value.

The first report by Gary Pivo (U of Arizona) and Jeffrey D. Fisher (Indiana U) was released last week and shows a 10 point increase in Walk Score increases commercial property values by 5-8%. Download the report here.

The second report by Joe Cortright and CEOs for Cities will be launching soon and revels how much one point of Walk Score is worth in different metro areas.  Stay tuned…