Real estate company Windermere Real Estate and data analytics firm INRIX have introduced a new feature that enables consumers to search for homes by car-commute times.
The announcement comes after an INRIX exec hinted at Real Estate Connect last month that the two companies might debut such a tool in the near future.
“We believe Windermere’s new ‘Search by INRIX Drive Time’ is going to revolutionize how buyers search for homes online — especially in high-traffic, metropolitan areas,” said Windermere Real Estate President O.B. Jacobi, in a statement. “We already know that commuting is a critical factor for 73 percent of buyers, and now they can filter their search results based upon drive-time criteria, just as they do for price, number of bedrooms, and other important attributes.”
To use “Search INRIX Drive Time,” consumers enter a work address, their ideal arrival time to work, and choose from 15-minute increments to specify how far they are willing to commute to that address.
The tool, which generates search results based on typical rush-hour conditions, then turns up all for-sale properties within that commute range, showing them within a boundary that indicates the maximum distance a property could be from the work address and still remain within the specified commute range.
Windermere joins Walk Score as the latest company to offer a search-by-commute tool. Walk Score, a neighborhood-discovery and rental-search site, debuted at tool that enabled users to search by commute in 2011, and claims to have been the first site to offer such functionality.
The tool enables a user to search travel times by public transit, car, bicycle and foot down to the minute. Like the Windermere tool, it indicates the limits of a specified commute time on a map.
But it also can expand or shrink those limits as a user drags a bar to increase or decrease a commute time. Late last month, it added the option to search by commute times that factor in rush-hour congestion.
Search INRIX Drive Time represents a more sophisticated application of analytics that power the original INRIX Drive Time, which Windermere introduced in March. Located on listing results pages, the tool enables a user to determine commute time from any for-sale property to another address.
INRIX obtains its traffic information from sources ranging from road sensors to real-time traffic speeds, drawn from a network of millions of vehicles and devices.
Consumers may use INRIX Drive Time to search for homes in all states with Windermere Real Estate offices.
Those states are: Arizona, Alaska, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington.