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

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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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Date
January 17, 2008