Zillow releases their neighborhood boundary layer - over 7,000 neighborhoods available to download

Zillow Releases Their Neighborhood Boundary Layer - Over 7,000 Neighborhoods Available to Download

January 16th, 2008 · 10 Comments · GIS

How about this news? Zillow has released their neighborhood boundaries in ESRI Shapefile format for everyone to use.

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.

Plus they are asking your help in updating the ones they created or add new ones where they didn’t exist before.

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.

Giving data back to the community at the same time asking for help is a wonderful way to get people involved with creating their neighborhood boundaries. Plus you can use their Zillow API in your own applications. I’ve been involved with a couple projects in the last 6 months where neighborhood boundaries are very important and had nothing to do with real estate.

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10 responses so far ↓

1 J Wallis // Jan 17, 2008 at 9:23 am

HOLY CRAP! I do not know of anything else that comes out this year that can top this.

WAY TO GO ZILLOW!
2 Neill // Jan 17, 2008 at 9:30 am

very very nice.. I can see a lot of uses for this data, especially the use of the api..I have not investigated yet but are there any plans to deliver this data in a webservice that can be consumed by other web applications, etc.
3 Drew M from Zillow // Jan 17, 2008 at 12:12 pm

J Wallis-
Glad you’re excited about this! I think there is huge potential benefit in having an open source, nationwide database of neighborhoods.

Neill-
If you have any questions about the zillow api, feel free to e-mail me (drewm at z dot com).
4 BC99 // Jan 17, 2008 at 12:51 pm

I put the state shapefiles into a single KMZ file. You can get them here:

http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Number=1095817&page=0&vc=1
5 Jack Dangermond // Jan 17, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Yawn. Manifold users have had a neighborhood boundary layer for years.
6 steve lombardi // Jan 18, 2008 at 11:27 am

good timing for the release of this code library from MSR to make working with large vector data sets in Virtual Earth web applications much easier:

http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!10980.entry
7 Ryan // Jan 18, 2008 at 1:09 pm

Hmmmm, sounds like fun. I have shapfiles of my town which are not on Zillows data set. Where do i upload? Couldnt find it on their site Thanks!
8 Drew M from Zillow // Jan 18, 2008 at 1:12 pm

Ryan-
Please leave a link to the file in the zillow discussion board - http://www.zillow.com/forum/site/ViewCategory.htm?tcid=19

We’ll then download the file and include it next time we update the file for your state.

Sorry, I haven’t written a “sticky” in zillow discussions to explain this yet — it’s on my to-do list.
9 Darrin Clement // Jan 22, 2008 at 1:57 pm

Maponics offers a program to actually pay you for your neighborhood work:
neighborhood boundaries

Yeah, not as cool as Zillow’s announcement, but still might interest some readers.
10 mytown // Jan 22, 2008 at 10:21 pm

looked at my city’s neighborhood boundaries, they were the same as what you can download free from the City for years, but it looks like zillow has a problem with a datum shift.