they first pass by a for-sale sign, Schiller says.
Other real estate sites such as Zillow.com track the history and value of specific homes, but Schiller says his company is looking to provide consumers with additional information on the streets and services beyond the immediate property. Homebuyers often think that they can gather enough information on where they’re looking to purchase a house by asking friends and neighbors in the area. And other data sources often provide information at a citywide level, rather than drilling down to get statistics on a particular slice of a city or town, he says.
“People thought they could just ask friends,” says Schiller. “They mistakenly thought that because they lived somewhere, they had perfect economic knowledge about their radius.” He learned this lesson the hard way himself, he says. He built a home before his company’s product came out, and later found out that the neighborhood two miles away had better schools and a lower crime rate, he says. (He later sold that home and moved to the better neighborhood.)
Schiller’s company is looking to partner with online consumer sites that host real-estate listings, like Boston.com, he says. His aim is for those listings to include a link to purchase the NeighborhoodScoutReport for the home a viewer is checking out. It will continue to offer its original search engine too, which runs around $30 a month for a subscription. The company recently closed the first part of its Series B round of funding, Schiller says. He didn’t reveal details on the financing, but Location showed up on our May under-the-radar deals list, with a $571,464 equity investment.
Schiller says he first got a taste of using statistical equations to do neighborhood matchmaking while pursuing his PhD in geography at Clark University in Worcester, MA (where he founded Location). And he often found himself checking out the neighborhoods listed in various publications as the country’s best places to live, only to find that
