Tools of the Trade

When my family and I moved here from Arizona two years ago we knew almost nothing about Seattle. We weren’t familiar with the geography, didn’t know much about the climate (okay, we had heard that it rains), and worse, didn’t know where to begin with all of Seattle’s neighborhoods. After emailing friends, and friends of friends, for pointers on where to look, and being only marginally less confused, we turned to Google for help. After a few days of searching around we had come up with a handful of tools that we used to narrow our search; hopefully they can help you too if you’re from out of town.

Our favorite tool, naturally, was Redfin. And I’m not just saying that because I’m writing on Redfin’s blog. We refreshed Redfin almost hourly to see which houses were popping up in our price range. But if you are reading this you probably already know about Redfin, so I’ll move on…

Overhead maps belie Seattle’s varying elevations, so we turned to Google Earth for a bit of clarity. It’s not a web tool, but the download is free and the software is easy to use. If you’re not familiar with the Seattle geography (or if you just want to explore the globe while sitting in front of your computer) Google Earth will give you a good feel for where the hills are, where the good views might be, and in general what the landscape looks like. There are even photographs uploaded by users that give you street-level views. Here’s a view of West Seattle from several hundred feet above Elliot Bay:

You can rotate the image in three dimensions to get a sense of the shape of the ground.

As we narrowed down the neighborhoods we would want to live in and could afford we hit city-data.com for some hard numbers. From there you can drill down on specific zip codes to get more detail than you will know what to do with. Age, income, education, sex offender information, schools, and lots of other data about who and what is in the area is available. Most of the data presented is compared to Washington state numbers so you can see how the area compares relative to the rest of the state.

I have to confess that only recently did I learn that this information (at least most of it, if not all) is available from right within Redfin. On the lower right of a property listing you will see these links:

These provide most of the same information, albeit in a nicer layout.

Finally, because we have young children we were also interested in data about grade schools: where the good ones are and the process for getting in. We found both at seattleschools.org. In particular, you can review WASL (Washington Assessment of Student Learning) scores rolled up by all sorts of attributes. My favorite page is the district summaries page, which provides a variety of test and survey data. This is not a definitive guide to the best and worst schools, but it’s a start.

If you have other good sites or software for house hunting, please post them. It will help others and I’m sure there are some that I’ve missed.