Some of you potential San Mateo County home buyers may have heard about NeighborhoodScout.com. Although it’s been around awhile now, we hadn’t really explored the site, which claims to match home buyer to their perfect neighborhood. So, I took a test drive of the site to see how well it performed.
The user-interface is very intuitive, but I was a bit surprised just how few questions they asked before providing you with a match list. You can see below that the drop-box gives you a few choices for “perfect neighborhoods” in my selected geography, San Mateo, California. (It also allows you to select a radius around the city you chose – a nice feature for San Mateo County home buyers considering multiple cities.)
NeighborhoodScout Search Box
The “First-time homebuyers” caught my interest, so I decided to take a scan of those results. You can probably imagine that I was a bit surprised that Atherton, California (Middlefield Road/ Ringwood Ave.) came up as the top match – followed by Woodside, California (Town Center) and then Hillsborough, California. While I am sure we would all love to buy our first home in Atherton, there are not many San Mateo County first-time buyers can afford to spend upwards of $1.8M on their first home, but I dove further into the results.
Results List
Neighborhood Detail
When you actually look at the neighborhood information it gives you, it does have some solid information. It does note the Atherton, California is the one of the most expensive places to live in both California and the country at large – which is accurate. Plus, it also throws in some information on the character of the neighborhood and socio-demographics.
Neighborhood Look & Feel
Lifestyle Information
The other tool that NeighborhoodScout.com offers is a matching tool – which could potentially be great for those looking to relocate to an area. The feature promises to match your address to a neighborhood in a new area.
Match Tool
So, our overall evaluation of NeighborhoodScout.com is mixed. While I would recommend it to get information on various San Mateo County neighborhoods, I wouldn’t put together a list of areas based on its recommendations. Again, our research shows that the internet is great for browsing, but when it comes to buying your new San Mateo County home, there is no substitute for a great San Mateo Realtor.
Looking for more neighborhood information? Click here for our posts on San Mateo homes, Redwood Shores homes, San Carlos homes and Belmont homes
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- Market Snapshot – The Perfect Tool for the San Mateo Home Buyer
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Raymond Stoklosa, Broker/Co-Owner
Chela Stoklosa, Realtor/Co-Owner
Dear Rebecca,
Thank you for taking the time to share with readers your experiences with NeighborhoodScout.com, the neighborhood search engine which I created. Creating NeighborhoodScout has been a passion of love – I love the subject, I enjoy uncovering surprising insights about cities, towns, and neighborhoods that some might never know about, and I am driven by my desire to put the power of making good choices in the hands of each and every person, before they buy a home – which is the largest single purchase for most Americans.
Upon reading your review, it came to my mind that you may have missed the power of our search engine. That is, each choice to find the best neighborhoods on our Find Tab has a unique set of advanced options so that any user can customize the search to fit them, including their home price range.
For first-time home buyers, for example, if you click the plus sign on the blue module that says ‘advanced options’ the site will fold out a set of search options that will allow each user to customize the search to their personal needs. Since a neighborhood that is affordable for first-time home buyers in the San Mateo area will be a different price than a first-time home buyer neighborhood in, say, Souix Falls, South Dakota, we let the user select the median house value that is right for them. If you do not select one, the search engine returns resutls as if ‘price is no object.’ No one price range will fit all first-time home buyers, especially home buyers in different areas of the country, so that is why we built the searches to be very customizable, and flexible to meet the needs of different people and families, including people who are doing research.
If you select the best neighborhoods for crime rates, and then select advanced options, you will see that you can search by crime inex (both violent and property crime), violent crime rate, property crime rate, and even crimes per square mile. You can also select to find the safest neighborhoods, or the most dangerous, or anywhere in-between, for total crime, violent crime, property crime, or crime density (crimes per square mile). You can even add to your ‘safe neighborhood search by choosing a house value, so you can find both a safe neighborhood and one that fits your budget. Each and every search is run on the fly and customized for that user. You can produce maps and data for any area, using any of these tools.
Another part of our site that you did not mention is the different tabs of data for neighborhoods below the map. The overview tab tells about price, types of homes (including age, size, and type), demographics, lifesyle, and more.
But we also have tabs with equal or even greater depth of data and charts for public schools, crime rates, and appreciation rates. You can even see the quarterly appreciation rate by neighborhood, for every neighborhood in America. Our school data uses a patent-pending method to nationally standardize NCLB test scores for true comparison (e.g., ‘is our school rated as an 85 in California as good as a school rated as an 85 in Arizona?”) On the crime tab, we even show you your chance of becoming a victim of violent or property crime for any neighborhood in America, compared to the city in which the neighborhood exists, and the state, as well as the nation.
These are all tools built to help empower all Americans to make the best decisions for them and their families. My mantra is ‘there is no one best neighborhood for everyone. But there are best neighborhoods for each person. I hope that NeighborhoodScout – my baby – can help each of us find a little heaven that is just right for us, no matter which area we live in. Your best neighborhood may be just a few miles from where you are right now, and you don’t even know it. I know that happened to me when my wife and I had our first daughter and built a house in a not-so-great school district, when a great school district was just 2 miles away.
Happy hunting, and thank you again for your thoughtful review. It meant a lot to me.
Warmest regards,
Andrew
Andrew Schiller, PhD
President
http://www.NeighborhoodScout.com
Dear Andrew,
We appreciate your feedback on our post about Neighborhood Scout and the great insider tips for our readers! It was especially helpful to point out how it is most effective to set the price range before you run your search so you can get more accurate results.
We definitely agree that there is no one best neighborhood for everyone and the choice of which neighborhood best suites home buyers is a very personal decision. As such, we encourage San Mateo County home buyers to educate themselves about each neighborhood so they can make the best decision for their current situation. As we are all very busy these days, we like to give our readers information about websites like yours to assist them in weeding out the neighborhoods that will not meet their specifications before they devote too much time viewing properties in that area.
Thanks again for your feedback and very best of luck with your website!
The Living Well in San Mateo Team
Neighborhood Scout itself is worthless. There is better information in the Internet for free, for example at http://www.city-data.com/. But what’s worse is that, if you give Neighborhood Scout your credit card info, they will enroll you in their most expensive service without your authorization, and stealthily steal from your credit card until you find out what’s going on. I had to close my credit card to get rid of these parasites.
Thanks, Alejandro for sharing your story. Sorry you had to go through all of that. Hopefully others will be able to avoid it. Best of luck to you!