It’s not enough to analyze a property, or even the overall market. The neighborhood surrounding your property is permanently attached and important to consider when investing in rental properties. You want to make sure that you understand where you’re investing and that it fits your goals and investment criteria.
On this episode we talk to Dr. Andrew Schiller. Dr. Schiller is the Founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of Location, Inc. He is responsible for inventing the search and neighborhood matching algorithms that powers www.NeighborhoodScout.com.
This is an episode you’ll want to listen to twice.
If you missed last week’s episode, be sure to listen to Market Spotlight: Investing in Indianapolis.
Enjoy the show!
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Make Better Decisions Using Neighborhood Info
We have a very special show for you today. I have Dr. Andrew Schiller on the show from NeighborhoodScout. That product is something we use a lot in addition to many other tools. I’ve been wanting to get Dr. Schiller on for three or four months now because he’s a very, very smart guy who aggregates a lot of data and has a tool called NeighborhoodScout.com that’s been around for many, many years. It’s just chockfull of information.
When we talk to investors, a lot of times, we go from talking about the market to talking about the property. Although there’s consideration and thought about the neighborhood, it seems that many investors skip over the neighborhood as if it’s just something that is attached to the hip of the property. Really, a lot plays into the decision of what you’re investing in because of the neighborhood: the demographics, maybe crime, schools, the percent of owner occupied homes, the number of people with college degrees, whether they’re white-collar, blue-collar workers, income levels and all that kind of stuff. Where do you get that data? It’s peppered all over the internet. You can go to many different websites and pull some of it from here and some of it from there, Bureau of Labor Statistics, the different government websites. But there’s no one website or one place where you can get all that data. One of the websites that we like to use is NeighborhoodScout.com. There’s a lot of that information, not everything but a lot. It’s just one of the tools in the toolbox.
On today’s show, we have Dr. Schiller talking about his company, the product, how they’re aggregating data and how you could use this tool to help you make better decisions in your investing, whether you’re purchasing a turnkey property or whether you’re purchasing a distressed property, you’re going to be fixing it up to keep it or fixing it up to flip it. At least you have a better understanding of what you have and what you’re dealing with.
It’s my pleasure to welcome Dr. Andrew Schiller to the show. Dr. Schiller is the founder, CEO and Chief Scientist of Location, Inc. He’s responsible for inventing the search and neighborhood matching algorithms that powers NeighborhoodScout.com. Andrew, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Marco. It’s a pleasure to be here.
I’m happy to have you here. I’ve been thinking about getting you on the show for the last three or four months. I’ve been dealing with a lot of other issues and I’ve been very, very busy so I haven’t had the time to bring you on. The reason I wanted to bring you onto the show is because you have an impressive tool that I’ve been using for a number of years. I’ve been a subscriber of yours for a number of years. I actually use it for my own investing and our company uses it internally here to look at different properties for our clients to help match those properties to what their goals and their criteria are. Before we get into all that, I’m really curious, you have a PhD in Geography, so what exactly does a person with a PhD in Geography do?
They build NeighborhoodScout of course, but also a lot of them are academics, a lot of them are in the CIA, a lot of people do foreign service, work for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, also work for the Goddard Space Flight Center around DC, and a lot of them are creating other types of really interesting products. A notable geography PhD that I know was the inventor of MapQuest. Other geographers build data and analytics about locations and help insurance companies make decisions. You’ll find geographers in all these types of vocations where knowing about locations really matters.
You’ve got a company called Location, Inc. I believe that’s the parent company to NeighborhoodScout.com. As I understand it, your companies are massive aggregators of data. You collect data across the country down to a very granular level. It seems to be the street level. Tell us about Location, Inc. and NeighborhoodScout.com and what it is.
Location, Inc. is a big data company that specializes in location based data, revealing the truth about locations and building predictive models and analytics to help us better understand how places are evolving, what they used to be like, what they’re like today and what they could be or are likely to be like in the future. We license data to some of the more major real estate investor trusts in the country. We license data to the US Federal Reserve. We license data and analytics to the Texas State Housing Authority and the New York State Housing Authority to help them understand which locations are going to be eligible for tax credits for builders who build affordable housing in those states. We also provide data and analytics to retail establishments so they can determine where to open stores and how to allocate limited security resources among their stores. We also power data and analytics to help insurers understand risk at locations, not necessarily risk of floods for example, but we have data that helps them understand the risk that house will go up in flames or there will be some type of a crime related insurance loss at the address.
I always ask this question of virtually anything and that’s how you source the data. When you have data at such a granular level, how are you able to get that data? It’s not like people are knocking on my door or calling my phone asking me am I the homeowner, how much income do I earn, do I have a college degree and all that kind of stuff. At least I don’t remember, maybe my wife answers the door, I’m not sure. I always question where the data comes from and how accurate it is, how old or fresh it might be.
On our NeighborhoodScout product, which was the very first product that Location, Inc. ever came out with and has been live on the web since 2002, it now serves more than 1.1 million unique visitors per month and it covers all of the US. We update the data on NeighborhoodScout at least seven times per year. Crime, school quality, real estate prices, rental values, appreciation rates, housing stock, demographics and predictive analytics, taxes, unemployment all get updated at different cycles that require us to push all these updates through NeighborhoodScout. We collect the data from all kinds of sources, government sources primarily that include things such as, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics and all kinds of sources. In total, we use a little bit more than 18,000 sources for the raw data, raw information that we get. Then we oftentimes get it at a certain spatial scales that are not the spatial scales that will make the most sense for people trying to make decisions on real estate investments. What we do is we use predictive modeling to build analytics using a meta-analysis across all the locations in the country to then estimate and produce new values and new data for tiny, tiny fine grained areas.
At one of our products, those fine grained areas are as small as 33 feet. We produce crime risk analytics that change every 33 feet for the whole country. That’s how we basically build it. We’ve been building this in house in that way. We are very artisanal shop, very old fashioned using the latest technologies and knowledge and predictive modeling, but we’re old fashioned in the sense that we actually handle and touch the data ourselves and actually build it here just like a fine bakery would make really great bread.
That’s all pretty powerful stuff, but to just say what you just said about predictive modeling in fewer words for someone who is maybe not too familiar with that, effectively, what you’re doing is you’re filling in the gaps by using your own algorithms to come up with what is likely to be the answer to a question where the data doesn’t exist. That’s the long and the short of it.
That’s exactly right. Data is messy.
Data is raw and there’s no intelligence in data until you actually analyze it, then you can extract intelligence.
That’s absolutely right.
You’re doing a great job with the data you collect. I’ve always been impressed with your product. You hired a survey company to interview me to ask about what I thought of the product, what I like, disliked, etc. I think that was a 30 or 45-minute phone call. I had a lot to say about it. It’s a great product and I think from what I understand, you’re making it much, much better.
Part of that is from help from people like you Marco, who took the time to give us a feedback on the product and help us think about how we could bring it to even the next level to help answer a lot of questions that different types of users have. When you have a product that provides somewhere between 300 and 400 different types of must-see statistics and data about every location in the US down to the sub zip code level, you get a whole lot of different types of use cases, different types of users. Having smart people to ask questions on how they use it is very helpful in making sure that we are providing the best type of information that’s actionable for you.
That’s a good segue to my next question. I’m not a homeowner. I’m not looking for a place to move to or live, I’m looking at NeighborhoodScout or data in general on the web as a real estate investor. I’m looking to make intelligent decisions and do my due diligence. When I use NeighborhoodScout, it’s because I’m looking at our property for investment purposes. As an investor, what should one look for when using NeighborhoodScout? What would you do? What would you suggest someone use the tool for?
There are some big patterns that we’ve been seeing in the data over the last few years that have been revealing to us. It looks like changes in a way that locations gain value. Some of these maybe new to you, but many of them may not be. It’s interesting to know what they are and then how to use NeighborhoodScout to pull them up. One of them has been that all along for many years, a lot of the intercity neighborhoods were declining in value while suburbs were growing in value, especially suburbs with good quality public school systems. This still is the case to a large degree that these good quality public school systems are real good bellwether for the quality and characteristics of the location outside of a major city.
Over the last few years, we did some research for the Wall Street Journal and found that there was a real strong trend in the best predictor of increasing values in real estate. For example, it wasn’t so much the quality of the school system as a rebound from the last downturn in real estate, but it was the closeness to the central business district, the middle of the city. The closer you were, the faster and farther those values were rebounding. We saw that to be a signal that it was happening whether you were in the Los Angeles area or Chicago or Washington DC or Boston or any of the other cities around the country. It was a relatively consistent signal. That was something that’s a bit different than before as we think about where people are moving, what they value and what they’re thinking about as a place that is going to make sense for them to buy real estate. One pattern was closeness to the central business district.
Another part of that that seems to be really important over and over again is really access to opportunities. It seems to be the thing that drives so much value in real estate as well as value in rental values. The closer you are to a high volume of high paying jobs, the greater the value of the real estate tends to be. I think that’s something that many people would know about of course, but sometimes they get lost in thinking about some of the other aspects of what’s going on in the real estate market. Those places that drive a great deal of their value from the amenity in situ that is a beautiful view or what have you, but aren’t really positioned to have great access to high paying jobs. Those types of places are much more vulnerable to seeing the value drop out in a downturn in the economy.
A strong regional economy and closeness to high paying jobs really that can drive value in places, if you’re looking to be a value investor. To find the balance between those going up in value areas near the cities and places that are great for income generating properties is to make sure that you’re not getting too far on one side of the other place that are so expensive to buy into, it’s very difficult. Places that have super high on the plumber rates or high crime rates on the other side, can be very difficult to get really good tenants that you can maintain over a long period of time because there’s lots of transients. We want to look for things that have a relatively stable or relatively low unemployment rate, even if the people don’t make a lot of money. They don’t have a huge amount of transients because it’s much easier to run into people and to have them stay for a little while than it is to have a lot of churn. Some of these characteristics are quite geared towards and influenced by vacancy rates. You can see that vacancy rates tend to go up in places that have a lot of transients and a lot of unemployment and tend to be lower in places that don’t.
It seems that it always comes back to jobs and job growth. Employment seems to be at the core of it all. A lot of people are moving closer to downtown cores or areas of concentrated employment because it’s just easier to commute to those locations. I think that’s why we see a lot of gentrification in various markets is because there are people who are clustering closer and closer to the downtown core or the centers of employment. That’s driving the gentrification, it’s not the other way around. How does that play into a market where there really isn’t a downtown core or one central place of employment? There are many markets that are spread out.
That’s right. Sometimes it’s just really access to high paying jobs and oftentimes households have multiple income earners in them. Having access to jobs or both is always very important to strive those values. Oftentimes, it can be cities that are in between those two. Some of those examples are those mid-cities areas between Dallas and Fort Worth for example, which have exploded in population in recent years. It used to be more prairie environment and now it’s hard to see a piece of prairie anywhere there.
The caution or the caveat there or the disclaimers that you can’t always invest based on just proximity to high paying jobs because you can look at an expensive market like San Francisco or San Jose or Washington DC and you’ve got a lot of high paying jobs in a small concentrated area, but it doesn’t make sense to spend $500,000 to a $1 million for a single-family detached home. The numbers still have to make sense and that has to drive your decision too.
That’s absolutely correct. We did some research looking at a lot of the metropolitan areas, the cost of the average home in terms of the average number of years and the average income for those metros. It looked like at about the height of the last housing boom, it had gone to, in San Francisco area, it was about ten years of the average income to buy the average house. It was very high. In other markets, today for example, Detroit area is about 2.8 years at the average income to buy the average house. It varies quite a bit. In trying to find out where that top of the market is, is tricky because it’s not uniform across the country. In some locations, people are more used to paying a higher proportion of their income for housing and then in others.
I would imagine that the average is three and a half, four years.
I think it is. I think that people tend to recommend that it’s about three and a half or four years and no more than that overall for people who are purchasing in. It does vary quite a bit. I know in the Boston area now, it’s somewhere around five or five and a half years at the average income to buy the average house.
That might be an interesting metric or tool to further analyze a market in addition to all the other things that are available through NeighborhoodScout and other tools out there. I have to think about that one. I might have to work on something. In fact, that would probably be a good metric to add to your NeighborhoodScout product. You already have the data.
That’s right. Actually, that’s one of the things that’s on our workbench now is to produce that, as well as taking a look at what we call value surfaces, which is a perimeter of half a mile to a mile to two to three miles around a particular property and what is the topography of real estate values around you. If their whole area is very elevated and you’re low, we look at what are the impediments to value creation at your location versus the steepness of the elevation around you for the values to come up. Or if you’re at the very top of your market and everything else is lower than you, what is the prospect for you ever being able to go up? Or if there’s a whole lot of areas around you that are inexpensive like there is in many of the Sun Belt cities away from the coast, there is not a lot of impediments to growth. Instead of growing up in value, they just grow out into space.
That’s true for many markets, but when you’re landlocked like in Orange County, California where I’m at, you can only go up, you can’t go out anymore. That just drives prices up even further than where they are at these crazy levels now. We’re talking about all these different factors, in your opinion, what are the most important factors that make for a stable neighborhood? Our company takes a top down approach. We’ll always start off with defining the market that makes the most sense for our investor. What are their criteria and what are they’re trying to achieve? Once you’ve identified a metro area or a market, then we get more granular and we start looking at different neighborhoods that achieve or meet the criteria that they have. They might be looking for A-grade neighborhoods or what we’ll call B-grade neighborhoods. They might be looking for certain price points, they might be looking for certain rent ranges, whatever it is. I guess in your opinion, what are those most important factors that define a stable neighborhood or a stable rental property in a particular neighborhood?
It tends to be relatively stable and relatively low or moderately low unemployment. A lot violent crime rate, even if the property crime rate is higher like it is elevated relatively high in and near a lot of college campuses. The violent crime rate tends to be relatively low in those types of environments. Low crime rate is also relatively important. Educational attainment of the people living in the area can also be important. Sometimes you don’t want the top of the market where 80% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or above. Having above the national average means that people will be able to find employment even if their circumstances change more easily than people who have less education, and therefore, there will be more stable tenants and more stable neighborhood. Also, people tend to stay put longer if they have some children. They’re rooted in the community and they tend to stay longer. Those are all indicators that are very useful for taking a look at stability in a neighborhood.
I like the way you defined or broke down crime because there’s property crimes and then you’ve got violent crimes. I certainly agree with you. Violent crimes are a major issue, whereas property crimes may not be a showstopper for me investing in a particular area. You’re always going to have some level or degree of property crime, but it may not be a major factor in my decision or someone else’s decision on that. Here’s something I was also curious about. I don’t know how you collect your crime data, and I’m not talking about your website. There are other websites, whether it’d be Trulia or Zillow or others that I’ve looked at. I look at the crime data, it makes me scratch my head because, even my property is in a very good area, but I look at properties that I know are in very good areas yet there is what seems to be an unusually high or unusually low level of crime. The same thing applies to school ratings. Maybe you can address the crime thing.
What we do for crime is we normalize it based on the resident population. Even if the counts are not super high, they can actually make a high risk location if the resident population in the vicinity of the property is not that high. What you always want to look at when you think about crime risk or your chances of becoming a victim of a property crime or a violent crime is how many crimes for how many people. If one only looks at counts, then clearly, New York City would be considered the most dangerous city in United States. But when you divide those counts of crimes by the 8.2 or 8.3 million people that live in the city limits of New York, you would quickly see that the rates are relatively low compared to many other cities. Therefore, on average, in New York City, your risk of being a victim is less. Sometimes a place that has more crime just means that there’s more people. What we want to look for is to basically normalize the numbers of crimes by the number of people that are living in the neighborhood. That really gives you a better indicator of the risks that anybody would have if they’re a resident there for a year or more. That’s quite helpful I think.
One thing also to think about is that property crimes are by and large, much more common than violent crimes. That’s a good thing, but a lot of times, the data is crunched. Look at the total numbers of crimes per resident or per thousand residents. In fact, many of those crimes are made up of petty theft and larceny as well as things like burglary and very much less of homicide, rape, armed robbery or aggravated assault, which are the violent crimes that we track. The place could actually have four times the murder rate of the national average in a location, but it would barely move a needle on the total crime rate per thousand because murders are so infrequent. Even four times is a very small number.
The way you normalize it is on a per capita basis?
Per capita basis. It’s always useful to look at a total crime index on NeighborhoodScout, but then to look below that and take a look at what are the violent crime rate in that neighborhood versus the property crime rate. It dis-aggregates it into the two buckets and you get a much richer understanding immediately just by looking at the graphs on what the problems may be in that location and if it’s really that much of a problem overall.
Let’s talk about schools for a sec. Again, I have the same problem. I look at all these different websites and they have these different rating and grading systems for the schools around a particular neighborhood. I always felt that those numbers were somewhat skewed because they’re either comparing them to a national average, which is I think highly unfair because all real estate markets are local or hyper local and everything happens within a very small area. It’s not that someone is shopping for a school between Kansas City or the other option being Houston, Texas. They’re going to look within a particular area and it’s all relative. Within those twenty schools in an area, one’s going to be a ten or the best and one’s going to be a zero or a one. I’ve always had a problem with this metric. I don’t know if it’s absolute or relative. A five out of ten might be considered a very good school in a particular area. How do you explain all that?
If you have ten schools to choose from in a local area, then you can rank order them and say, “This is my best and this is my worst of those ten.” Having an objective number like a five or something like that as the quality rating, will tell you that even maybe your best choice is only a five and maybe you were looking at these schools in this neighborhood, you might want to look at the next town over, which has the best school that’s rated a seven or an eight. You may want to expand your search area by a few miles further than you were looking previously. I’ve seen this happen a lot. People oftentimes, emotionally restrict the areas that they want to look in simply because the people that they know and talk with also have young children live in a community and they restrict it to what’s the best school in this community, when in fact, they might be able to move just three or four or five miles away and open up their options to look at better schools yet.
We are based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which is a city of almost 200,000 people about 40 miles west of Downtown Boston. Worcester public schools, by most measures, are not the best schools in Massachusetts or in Worcester County or in the US. Oftentimes, even in the well-to-do neighborhoods of Worcester, people talk about what’s the best school to send your children to in public school elementary school in Worcester when they begin school. Almost all the towns around Worcester, just within five miles of the city, have phenomenally good schools that are nationally ranked. Just thinking a little bit beyond that limited universe of that one community can really open up options for people to see. I think having the ratings is very useful to know that even the best choice may not be a great choice.
Clearly, these are relative numbers. It’s a relative scale. It’s not that five is good or bad, it’s what five is versus a seven versus a three.
Right. What we do at NeighborhoodScout is we panned it a way to make a school college ratings nationally comparable, but we also show a relative ranking to the state. How the school compares within its local cohort in the state? You can look at both dimensions. The reason that’s important is that about one out of five Americans lives in a metropolitan area that hits a stride two or three states. They could move to neighboring communities and any of those states and they’d stay in the same metro and stay at the same job. Without a score like that, you’d have no way to really compare objectively the quality of schools and may just be a few miles apart from each other.
Other things you have on the website are things like occupational breakdown, percentage of people with college degrees. These are all really great demographic metrics. I like to see that kind of stuff. In fact, I wish you had more. You have a great selection of stuff on there; unemployment rate and even how things are trending, whether something is increasing or decreasing. How important are demographics to you? How important are demographics to a real estate investor? Again, this is more what your opinion is about it.
It depends on how you define demographics overall. I think that declining population can mean many things that could make it difficult to get higher rents in a certain area on occasion. That educational attainment is very formative for a location. I think migration, population, population trends, income education, income trends, are all very important for understanding a particular location. If you have sub-markets where certain languages can be very important for population so that they feel acclimatized in the locality and would feel very comfortable and positive there, that can oftentimes be a really wonderful thing for people to find a place that feels like home to them. Overall, it’s more related to the housing stock and the types of people who live there. Sometimes it’s the age groupings. Oftentimes, a community could be very many people who are from 25 to 40. In other cases, there may be a population of people in the houses that are mostly 45 to 65 and then a lot of children. In other cases, there are very few children at all. It’s mostly people who are senior citizens, 65 and over. It can make a big difference in the way that the community feels and also what the rental values may be at those locations.
One of the questions we sometimes ask our investor clients is, who are you trying to service? What is a description of your ideal tenant that you want to service? That could be a Walmart tenant, a Macy’s tenant or a Nordstrom tenant. If you have that in mind, then you can go back and look at things like the occupations that make up the demographic of that neighborhood and the income, etc. and work it backwards. You can find a neighborhood that will meet the criteria that you have defined for yourself as far as an investment. I like the way you’ve laid all that out because it just makes very easy to retrofit what is your ideal tenant to what your investment should be.
We have two paths to it. One is a build function, which allows you to select the criteria that you’re looking for in the search area and then it will identify map and rank order list the neighborhoods that best meet those criteria. Then you can click in and see the full profile about those neighborhoods so you can look at if these are the places that you would like to find properties to purchase or invest in. Another way is that we have a look alike function, which we call match. In that way, if you have a property that’s done very well for you, you feel very comfortable working with a certain type of demographic for your rentals, you can just simply type in an address that’s in that neighborhood to find a search area and find other neighborhoods that are most similar to it, anywhere that you want to look.
What’s the future of NeighborhoodScout? What do you have on the board? What’s coming up?
We are coming up with new indexes for investors that take a look at the blue chip quality of a neighborhood as well as predicting the future outcomes of certain areas over the next 24 to 36 months. We’ve been looking at ways to forecast values. This started with our forecasting of crime data. We had trends of crime in the past to today, but then forecast of a crime today to the future, we were showing this to people in the meetings and they started to get excited and yell out in the meeting that this is really surrogate for looking at neighborhood and community change. Some people want to call it gentrification or rejuvenation, whatever it may be, but they were very interested in taking a look at what those forecasts for places where they lived and how that might change what happens. We decided to use that as a starting point to explore ways to find out how we can best predict the future of locations, near term future, 24 to 36 months for real estate investing purposes at the sub zip code level. Marco, what kind of data do you like to use when you’re putting in your criteria for places to search for, to find the right investment properties on NeighborhoodScout?
I always start with the address because I’ll always have a specific address to type in. Then I pull up the information. I glance at the special characteristics, which I know a lot of listeners are probably wondering what that’s all about. It’s just a scale from 0 to 100 on five or six characteristics like, is the area hip and trendy or urban sophisticates? That’s all defined on the site. Me personally, I don’t put a lot of weight into that. It’s just something I glance at, but I’ll quickly scroll down and I like to look at the mix of occupations. What percentage of that neighborhood are made up of executives, managers and professionals versus the other end of that spectrum, which will be factory workers and laborers? Obviously, that just tells me how many people are going to white-collar, higher income earners versus blue-collar workers that are on the lower end of that socioeconomic spectrum. I’ll glance at the unemployment rate, I just want to know if it’s near the national average. But if it’s very high, then obviously that’s a negative factor, it’s a red flag.
Another thing I look at always is the percent of owner occupied homes in an area. That plays heavily into my decisions and heavily into what we recommend to clients. Those are probably the major things. Minor things are the home ownership trend, is it increasing or decreasing? That’s not a make or break. I’m also curious about appreciation rates in a neighborhood, just to see what has happened over the last two to five years. I don’t really care about what happened over the last 10, 20 years nor do I really care about the last quarter because that’s too narrow, but you can annualize that.
You’re looking at understanding where this neighborhood is and where it’s been, so you have a sense of where it might be headed.
Yeah. I’ll be honest, I skip over the public school system. I half-jokingly refer to public schools as government indoctrination camps. I don’t put a lot of weight into that. Schools are schools and they’re going to be there. There’s not much you can do to change it. At the end of the day, if an area is appealing to tenants and there’s a good tenant pool and they’re going to live there, I don’t care if they’ve got the best or the worst schools, there will always be tenants that will fill those properties in an area if everything else checks out. I really just skip over public schools. I’d look at crimes, I just want to make sure that it’s not out of whack, it’s not really high compared to the local area or the city. That’s about it. That’s how I use the tool.
We do encourage our clients to go and visit NeighborhoodScout, maybe subscribe if they want to, to do their own due diligence. It’s not something we hide from them, but it’s just one of many tools out there that I think is pretty powerful, especially if you’re investing out of state. You’re in California, you’re buying something in Kansas City, we can provide all kinds of information, but we can’t do all the due diligence for our clients. This is just one of the tools that we give them or tell them about to go and do their due diligence and verify what we’re telling them.
That’s very helpful to hear. I’m glad I got a chance to interview you for a minute as well.
Thanks for the question. It was a good question. I’m sure people are curious, what do I look at? What do I use? This is why I asked you early on, what are the most important factors to you that make a stable neighborhood or a stable rental, because I wanted to know what was important to you. I just told you what’s important to me.
One of the things that we have understood from a long time ago is that people try to understand things they don’t know by comparing them to things they do know. We use the match algorithm to allow people to type in addresses so that they can understand how similar or different neighborhoods are to some place that they understand and know very well; maybe something that they’re trying to replicate or something that they’re trying to stay away from. It helps people digest a new place that they haven’t seen or haven’t seen a lot to better understand what kind of place it is, what kind of context is in this location.
That’s great, it was wonderful to hear some of the things that you think are important and ways that you use NeighborhoodScout. NeighborhoodScout has been a labor of love for us. We’re really very focused on building the very best product and analytics that we possibly can. Our goal is to reveal the truth about locations and then allow people to have a tool to find the place that best match whatever it is that they’re looking for, for their investment needs, whatever end of the spectrum it’s on.
You’re doing a great job. I’m looking forward to your future revision because I like what I hear about what you’re coming out with. I’m going to be looking forward to that. Andrew, anything else you’d like to share with our listeners? Anything else I didn’t ask you about that I should have?
I don’t think so. I think this has been great and it’s very enjoyable to spend a few minutes together talking about these subjects. I hope that we get a chance to talk again.
I appreciate your time. If our listeners are interested in finding out more about you or your product, I guess NeighborhoodScout.com is where they could find you and your product?
Absolutely right. It’s easy to find. We look forward to having them visit.
Andrew, I thank you for your time. It’s been very informative. I’m sure this will be a very popular episode.
Thank you so much. Nice to talk with you, Marco.
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