Use A Real Estate Data API On Your Website To Answer Buyers’ Cost Of Living Concerns
A Real Estate Data API that shows Cost of Living information can be a very effective tool for attracting home buyers and impressing home sellers.
Here’s a good example why.
Perhaps you heard the recent news that sent shock waves throughout the country.
Reports surfaced that said the Department of Housing and Urban Development determined that earning more than $100,000 a year in the San Francisco Bay Area was just considered “low income.”
Low income on six figures?
People in the rest of the nation probably stared at their computer screens in shock.
But yes, that’s the reality in that part of the country.
If you make $70,000, well, in some Bay Area counties you are considered “Very low income.”
The bottom line: if you are thinking of moving to the Bay Area, you had better do your research and you better make sure that company will pay you tons of money.
Real estate data API addresses the cost of living issue
For real estate brokers and agents, there’s a bigger picture here.
Everyone who considers a move or is relocating, will be concerned about the Cost of Living.
It’s a big factor today.
Sure, someone might be offered a great job in XYZ town, but after they do the math, they discover that they may actually be lowering their income.
If a prospect is a retiree, then the Cost of Living is THE major issue for their fixed income lifestyle.
Anyone who is on a tight budget will pay attention to housing costs and Cost of Living.
This is a major question that will be on the minds of many people. (And if it isn’t, a broker can pose that issue to them to help make a more thorough and well-researched decision).
That’s why embedding a Real Estate Data API is adding a tremendous resource to a real estate website.
Take Home Junction for example.
Their Real Estate Data API offers feeds for the critical areas of research for home buyers such as:
- Recent Sales Activity
- Trends in Home Prices
- Boundaries such as Municipal boundaries for taxes and School District boundaries for schools. (Plus those ever-so-important School Attendance Zones showing exactly where students will be attending).
- Demographics
- Crime Statistics
- Neighborhood data
- Home Value Estimation Tools
And much more.
Every one of those data feeds will be of interest to home buyers.
(And you can use every one of those data feeds to show sellers how you are going to position their listings in a favorable light).
Demographics and expenses
But another dataset offered by Home Junction is Cost of Living Indices.
Think about the statistical picture a broker or agent can paint for someone who is interested in comparing the Cost of Living from one community to another.
With the Real Estate Data API, a person can examine a neighborhood for:
- Population
- Average Income
- Average Home Value
- Percentage of Owners
- Percentage of Renters
- Age
- Education
- Employment – professional, labor, health care, arts, education and service.
The specific Cost of Living Index shows how that neighborhood ranks compared to the average for:
- Apparel
- Education
- Entertainment
- Food
- Health
- Housing
- Transportation
Promote the fact that home buyers can search through this data on their own on your website (with a Real Estate Data API feed from Home Junction).
Look at all the answers they can find about an area!
If they see a neighborhood that has a high average home value, a large percentage of professionals with above average income, you can pretty much guess the Cost of Living there will be higher. The additional data will confirm this.
Easy way to compare neighborhood spending power
With Home Junction’s Comparative Analysis tool a consumer can drill down even deeper.
Compare one neighborhood to another.
The Real Estate Data API provides all the relevant data such as Average Income, Average Home Value, etc.
But the Cost of Living tool will also reveal how far $1,000 will go in one town compared to the next. It calculates those Cost of Living factors such as food, health care, transportation etc.
If one town will cost you on average $700 for those items compared to another town where it will cost $1,000, well, then that’s a sizable difference and cause for concern.
Conversely, if an agent can show Mr. and Mrs. Retiree that by moving ten miles across town to this nifty little neighborhood, they could be saving themselves a sizable chunk of cash every month.
Cost of Living calculators are nothing new. There are plenty of them on the web. Many of them probably use the same factors for their statistics.
What’s fairly new is that brokers and agents can now embed this tool on their own websites. Why let a hot prospect go all over the web and find this information elsewhere and perhaps give up their contact information as well?
Steer them to your real estate website instead.
More than 90% of home buyers say one of the primary items they look for in an agent is local knowledge.
This is 2018.
Are you going to just say you have local knowledge?
Or are you going to add a powerful Real Estate Data API that displays detailed, hyper-local Cost of Living data and other information right there on your website for all to see?