Diverse Solutions Introduces Partnership with Walkscore

Very, very cool. You may have read about Walkscore on my blog before …

A lot of my clients searching for homes in the City of Charlottesville (less-so) in Albemarle or the other surrounding counties are very concerned about walkability. I’ve written about being able to walk or bike to “stuff” many times over the years. Heck, I’ve even defined modern civilization as being “close to a coffee shop or grocery store.”

Now I’m very pleased to see that the folks who do my search tool, have implemented Walkscore. People want to be able to walk or bike to stuff – coffee shops, restaurants, grocery stores …

Caution: Walkscore is not 100% accurate. It’s probably not even 80% accurate … but it presents a good guide. If a house has a Walkscore of 90, it’s probably pretty walkable. If its score is 20, probably notsomuch.

From DS’ blog:

1. Search by Walk Score. Now this is cool. We love being able to put in an address Walk Score, but it makes it SO much better when you don’t have to constantly look up the Walk Score for each address for each property you’re interested in buying / leasing.

   2. Sort by Walk Score. If you can search by Walk Score, you should be able to sort by Walk Score too. Just click in the “sort by” box at the top of the results and choose “Walk Score, Highest First” to order the search results from highest to lowest Walk Score.

   3. View the Walk Score in both the search results and property details. Even if our clients choose not to show the “Search by Walk Score” search panel, they can still enable the functionality to allow their visitors to see the Walk Score for each listing in both the search results and property details. Check it out here; just look for the little walking guy icon at the top-right of each search result and in the top-right corner of the property details area.

   4. View the Walk Score tile. When you click on the “Walk Score” link at the top-right of the property details area, you’ll see the Walk Score tile that shows all of the amenities that are factored into the score.

But … FranklyMLS has had a link to Walkscore for some time now (archived: 2013) … 🙂 just not the sweet integration (yet).

*note … I’m going to move this to the main blog shortly, but was faced with a choice – publish and push off the Economic Summit blog or don’t publish and be slow to respond. I chose a happy medium.