In order to better serve the demands of New York City real estate consumers, The New York Times is releasing fresh pricing tools for users on their Find a Home platform. These tools are aimed at assisting buyers in their searches as they navigate the NYC real estate market.
What makes the NY Times Find a Home developments noteworthy? To start, buyers can now understand how far their dollar can stretch – a somewhat foreign concept in pricey markets like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Nonetheless, the new platform clearly displays where else buyers could be looking based on budget with the latest Explore Neighborhood pricing widget. This option shows price ranges in neighborhoods within consumers’ interests and then takes one step further by recommending homes buyers might not have otherwise considered. For agents suggesting their buyers expand searches outside of their fixed scope, the tool might provide that extra push, with a visually appealing interface and valuable data to boot.
The NY Times is offering guides that spread across all five boroughs, with data trends for five-year, one-year or three-month spans. This way, potential buyers have the first-hand knowledge and can consult their agents with some familiarity of the shifting NYC market at their fingertips.
[graphiq id=”hcIGsX5VL9j” title=”New York City, NY Real Estate Market Trends” width=”600″ height=”786″ url=”https://w.graphiq.com/w/hcIGsX5VL9j” link=”http://places.findthehome.com/l/71121/New-York-City-NY” link_text=”New York City, NY Real Estate Market Trends | FindTheHome”]
Another module, named ‘What will I get for my dollar?’ provides a neighborhood-based home search tailored by the low, median and high-tier markets. With the wide-ranging NYC real estate market, and varying clientele within, this customized experience is key.
The NY Times didn’t skimp on characteristic features of the search process, either. Its ‘baseball card’ module features average days on the market, inventory organized by number of bedrooms, home listings density and price-per-square-foot comparisons. It’s also rolling out a comparative affordability chart, which parallels selected neighborhoods with other boroughs in NYC and offers the opportunity to filter by a single borough. Finally, users have the chance to view the boundaries of their searched neighborhood, neighborhoods nearby and overall sales density within their search zone.
The New York Times created these handy resources using data from its listings database and New York City public records. Both The NY Times newsroom and product teams worked together on the upcoming launch.
Matthew Shadbolt, director of real estate products for The New York Times, spoke with Inman exclusively on the launch of the pricing guide.
What prompted The New York Times to develop these tools for its audience?
Very often, we hear from our users that finding listings online isn’t a problem they have anymore, given the proliferation of listings sites available to them, but determining the specific neighborhood in which to search is still primarily an offline, problematic activity. We felt that building a suite of insight-driven tools to help our users understand how to ‘course-correct’ for different neighborhoods while they’re already searching, would add a valuable, unique layer around search that would ultimately help our users get to that right neighborhood faster and in a more informed, smarter way. We’re also very interested in surfacing clear, easy-to-understand insights around affordability, inventory and the temperature of a neighborhood in helping our users get smart about where they could be looking.
The ‘What will I get for my dollar?’ module isn’t the runof the mill real estate search engine tool and it’s organized by low, mid and high price points. Is this unique because of NYC’s wide-ranging real estate clientele?
It’s a simple way to understand what the lower, middle and high end affordability of the market actually looks like for properties within a particular neighborhood. The module is powered by the active listings inventory, so users can see this change on a daily basis.
There’s a suggestions tool for where else a user can look based on budget. Do you think NYC residents get stuck searching in one neighborhood, and how can agents help them expand their scope once they’ve done their online vetting?
The path of home searchers, especially in New York, is inherently non-linear, so our goal with these tools is to help users move between neighborhoods within a particular budget they’d already have in mind, and help them understand market pricing in a clear, insightful way. However, there’s no substitute for actually visiting a neighborhood in person and really getting a feel for the place, especially with an agent.
Any plans to roll this out to markets beyond NYC?
When it comes to being helpful, we’re always interested in other markets beyond New York.
