School boundaries can now be featured on agent websites

If schools are one of the most important factors that buyers look for in a home, why don’t you have school boundaries showing prominently on your real estate website?

These simple lines on a map are one incredible selling tool for brokers and agents.

According to a study by the National Association of Realtors, the quality of school districts was the FOURTH most important factor for home buyers age 35 to 49. It was the SIXTH most critical factor overall. (As you know, every homeowner also knows the value of schools for property prices, even if they don’t have children).

School boundaries are extremely important to home buyers (and obviously to sellers in quality school districts as well).

A real estate data provider such as Home Junction can easily help a broker or agent integrate critical school boundaries onto their website.

Home Junction gathers giant geo-data sets of information on boundaries.

That data includes:

Neighborhoods
Subdivisions
School attendance boundaries
School districts
Zip codes

What’s important to note is that these datasets go down not to just the county or zip code level, but all the way to the neighborhoods and subdivisions in an area. This is crucial for school boundaries in particular.

By implementing a simple API (Application Programming Interface), which is basically a few bits of code, a broker or agent can make their website a powerhouse of this hyper-local boundary information.

Agents can feature school boundaries on their web pages

How is this accomplished?

Without getting too technical (Home Junction experts will be glad to explain the technical details if you want) those millions of bits of geo-data are organized to create points or coordinates. Those points are then translated into “shapefiles.”

A shapefile is basically a format for showing geo-metric locations when points are joined together into boundary lines. Those shapes basically look like geometric polygons or the outline of an area on a map.

As you can imagine, for a broker or agent to sit down and compile all this information and then draw all those maps would be, well, just about impossible.

And just when you think you may have completed such a monumental task, the cruel point is, boundaries frequently change.

Especially school boundaries.

Sometimes a school may have too many students and the school attendance zones need to be changed. Or perhaps a new school was recently built and a major shift will be required with all the boundaries in all surrounding neighborhoods.

On top of that, then you have those choice charter school and magnet schools that many parents covet for their children.

In addition to the school boundaries, Home Junction also provides details about schools in a text format showing addresses, contact information, principals name, etc.

They also have datasets on student/teachers ratios, etc.

Promote boundary data to buyers and sellers

Studies show owning a house in a popular school district will have a major impact on the price per square foot compared to homes in other areas.

These hyper-local school boundaries and information are hyper-important datasets.

When talking to potential buyers, are you just telling people about the school districts verbally by happenstance?

Or, are you the local broker or agent who has all these school boundaries laid out on a map integrated with a local MLS database into the website?

Which agent do you think house hunters will be more impressed with? Which agent do you think sellers in great school districts will want to list their homes with?

Which agent has a powerful feature they can promote on their home page? Which agent can promote these school boundaries on their social media sites?

At the end of the day, is your school information an A-plus or a D-minus?

When you display these valuable school boundaries on your website, you move to the head of the class for expertise on one of the most important questions posed by house hunters today.