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7000+ Neighborhood Boundary Files in Shapefile Format

By: Drew Meyers, Community Relations Specialist | January 16, 2008 |

Amidst the crazy week of announcements last week, Zillow Labs quietly expanded. Our latest addition is a project our data analytics team worked on internally for quite some time. It’s not some cool little web application (though we do build those as well) like you might expect. It’s a bunch of, well, DATA. What sort of data you may ask? The boundary lines for over 7,000 neighborhoods around the United States covering roughly 150 cities. These neighborhood shapes are now available, zipped up in the Arc Shapefile format, for anyone to download.

Determining boundary data was quite a feat, as currently this information isn’t readily available through a single public source. Thus, we determined these on our own through various tactics, including calling individual chambers of commerce, tourism and convention boards, speaking with real estate agents and community members in these areas, as well as using available online local sources.

So, after all this work, why are we giving this data away for free? Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of neighborhoods will result in some great innovation that we’re excited to check out. Real estate is local — and neighborhoods are a great way to look at real estate on a local level. We’re particularly excited to see what companies and individual techies can come up with, who may not have the budget to license this data from other data providers. There is almost limitless possibilities in terms of mashing up GIS data — for instance, you could easily overlay earthquake zones and tag a neighborhoods’ likelihood of experiencing an earthquake.

Additionally, it’s a way for people to use and contribute to our growing database to help improve the boundary lines, though you do have to have some GIS technical knowledge (note that you’ll need ArcGIS software to work with the actual shapefiles). After all, we don’t know Phoenix like a local agent does nor do we know Boston like a Boston resident does. If your city is not one of the 150 cities covered currently, and you know enough GIS (or have access to someone who does), you can draw your own boundaries for your city and notify us by posting a thread in Zillow Discussions. We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.

What is required from you to use the files? Simple - just attribute Zillow as the source of the data and make any updates or changes you make to the files available to everyone else via the same or similar license.

We’re excited to see what innovation occurs as a result of this data being freely available for anyone to work with. Using the rid (region id number), the boundary files could be easily integrated with local neighborhood data available via the API (or our quarterly report data) to create a pretty compelling local real estate overview page integrated into your own site. Other possible uses include a neighborhood heat map or a comparison tool.

If you have additions, improvements, feedback or questions, please go to our developer discussions.

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Comments

33 Comments so far

  1. Michael Wurzer on January 16, 2008 7:32 pm

    Very cool.

  2. Zillow releases their neighborhood boundary layer - over 7,000 neighborhoods available to download on January 16, 2008 7:36 pm

    […] about this news? Zillow has released their neighborhood boundaries in ESRI Shapefile format for everyone to use. Determining boundary […]

  3. Andrew Mattie on January 16, 2008 9:10 pm

    This is really exciting! My head is just swimming with all of the different possibilities this brings us now.

  4. Ross Johnson on January 17, 2008 12:53 am

    Just what the Dr. ordered! Quite a step up from just giving us geographical centerpoints of neighborhoods! I’m fired up to see how the Zillow defined San Francisco neighborhoods compare to the city defined neighborhoods and my “cognitive map” of SF.

    You mention using these shapefiles with the data available via your API. Is there a chance we can look forward to any kind of update to the census demographic data before the next census? It has been a while since 2000. I know ESRI provides current demographic estimates and projections forward five years using the 2000 census data all the way down to the census block level in their Business Analyst product.

  5. I love that Zillow just… « 4realz.net on January 17, 2008 2:32 am

    […] January 17, 2008 by Dustin …opened up their neighborhood boundary data. […]

  6. David Torres on January 17, 2008 9:50 am

    Wow, that’s a lot of work! I look forward to seeing what innovative uses the community comes up with.

  7. Minnesota & Wisconsin Lake Property on January 17, 2008 5:27 pm

    This will be very helpful. i agree with your opnion “Here at Zillow, we’re all about transparency — we think a freely available and totally transparent nationwide data-set of ….”

  8. Alpharetta Real Estate on January 17, 2008 7:11 pm

    Drew: As my 4th grader says: Awesuuumm! I’ve been wanting this data for a loooong time. As a single realtor with blood sweat and more blood for my IT budget, i just couldn’t afford access to this data before. Now, by Zillow’s generosity, I can! You guys certainly know how to win friends…lead with the giving hand they say.

    I can’t wait to see what i can do with this for the Alpharetta Georgia real estate market…I have tons of ideas.

    Thanks…and i wear my Zillow tee shirt regularly to the gym!

    thx, k.

  9. Alpharetta Real Estate on January 18, 2008 8:35 am

    Drew, which product from ESRI is needed to read this data? The free ArcReader doesn’t seem to want to open the data…it is looking for a .pfm file.

    thx, k.
    Kevin Warmath

  10. Drew Meyers on January 18, 2008 9:42 am

    ArcView GIS should open it.

  11. Alpharetta Real Estate on January 18, 2008 9:53 am

    ArcView is $1,500 for a single user license…a bit out of reach for the individual realtor on the street. Are there any other options? It would be a pity to have this data available but not be able to work with it because of a licensing expense.

    ArcReader is at least free to view the data with although i doubt we could make the edits/updates that you are hoping that the “realtor on the street” could make.

  12. Matt Priour on January 18, 2008 10:57 am

    @Alphretta
    ArcReader will open shapefiles but is not very intuitive and is highly limited in its functionality.
    I would suggest downloading QGIS (Download , Screenshots & Info).

    QGIS is a very good basic GIS program that gives you a lot of functionality. I highly recomend it to people who don’t need the full fledged professional GIS suite.

  13. Drew Meyers on January 18, 2008 11:51 am

    Unfortunately, I think this type of data is more geared towards web developers and the GIS community. Hopefully, we’ll start to see some of the agent website providers and independent developers build some interesting and easy to implement applications for agents to use.

    What sort of neighborhood application are you looking for?

  14. technut on January 18, 2008 4:18 pm

    Drew & Zillow team - first of all, thanks for open sourcing this data. I’m sure, like me, the entire development community appreciates this gesture. In doing a few sanity checks on the data, I noticed that Fisherman’s Wharf (San Fran neighborhood) is missing from the CA file. Any ideas why this may be missing?

  15. Drew Meyers on January 18, 2008 4:52 pm

    We relied mostly on online research and calling county offices to determine boundary lines — but we know we’re missing some neighborhoods. The reason we opened it up via creative commons is so that others can contribute to the growing database, which should lead to a more accurate overall database of neighborhoods.

  16. Alpharetta Real Estate on January 18, 2008 9:41 pm

    I wrote a cyncial response with i decided not to post ;-

  17. Matt Fox on January 18, 2008 10:13 pm

    I’ve converted all these boundary files over to Google Earth. You can download the KML file here.

    http://www.gelib.com/zillow-neighborhoods.htm

    Matt

  18. Matt Fox on January 18, 2008 10:21 pm

    By the way, if you don’t have Google Earth, it sort of works in Google Maps also. To use in Google Maps, go to maps.google.com and paste the following into the search bar. Replace the XX with the two letter state code you wish to view.

    http://www.gelib.com/maps/ZillowHoods/XX.kmz

    Matt

  19. Scott Ruthfield on January 19, 2008 12:40 am

    This is great - we’ve already started some early experiments with combining your neighborhood data with our contact data, so that searchers could either find people by neighborhood or see the neighborhood that people they’re searching for live in. Hope we’ll have more to show (or others will) soon.

    Thanks, neighbors!

    -Scott, WhitePages.com (

  20. Alpharetta Real Estate on January 19, 2008 6:43 am

    Matt: FANTASTIC! Thanks for doing this…now i can see the data and figure out interesting things to do with it.

    My part of ATLANTA is not mapped yet, but this is a start. I’ve got to figure out how to map my area now…but this is great.

    thx, k.
    Kevin Warmath
    Alpharetta, GA

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  24. edparsons.com » Blog Archive » Zillow move should allow other small scale experiments on January 21, 2008 4:44 pm

    […] weeks announcement on the Zillow blog that is was releasing its neighbourhood boundary data to the community in Shapefile format is the story of the year so […]

  25. Geospatial Semantic Web Blog - GIS Data Integration, Geo Ontology, Geo Tagging & Geo Web 2.0 News » Blog Archive » Free US neighborhood boundary data from Zillow on January 21, 2008 7:36 pm

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  27. Zhilong on January 22, 2008 12:30 am

    nice work

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  33. Stephanie on April 13, 2008 3:17 pm

    I was so excited to find this list. Until I noticed that you have not ONE listing for Oklahoma. When are the small guys every gonna get a chance to play. (I mean, come on, not Tulsa OR OKC??)

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