Bay Area Rental Price Heatmap by ZIP Code

This is fairly off topic, but as someone who has dabbled with GIS before, zip codes mapped as geographic areas bother me.<p>"ZIP codes designate only delivery points within the United States and its dependencies, as well as locations of its armed forces."<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code</a><p>So a zip code is more properly represented as an ordered point string or point cloud, rather than an area. There exist zip codes with up to 11 non-contiguous areas, zip codes which are valid only for the north half of an east-west street, and other oddities. You can fudge this a little by just drawing bounding boxes, but then you have up to 5 zip codes overlapping in some places.<p>That bit of trivia aside, they do make sense from a real estate point of view because a) all domiciles will have a zip code and b) it is usually freely available on listings.<p>Generally though, it's better to translate any given address to a census tract or census block group, since those divisions are actually defined as "a geographic region defined for the purpose of taking a census" - they can be properly mapped without ambiguity, crossovers, discontinuities, and other boggling features of zip codes, (though not of course with <i>perfect</i> regularity) and they also coordinate well with demographic data like median income - I'd be very interested to see a graph of percent of median income per square foot - I suspect you'd find some very 'hot' areas that don't seem like it.

Quick mash up adding plots for population density, % renter property and % owners (this took about 2 minutes - I was just intrigued how they all compared, which seemed especially relevant given the most recent XKCD).<p><a href="http://www.holehouse.org/other_content/sanfran.jpeg" rel="nofollow">http://www.holehouse.org/other_content/sanfran.jpeg</a><p>Source of maps: <a href="http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/demographics/" rel="nofollow">http://maps.webfoot.com/demos/demographics/</a>

So Santa Clara and most of San Jose don't exist?<p>You can even see where it cuts off. See that little burnt orange stub at bottom center which sticks out into a sea of white? That's Central at Lawrence, where the SV/SC border goes nutty due to some annexing wars back in the '60s.<p>To answer the question posted in the post, no, I cannot find my zip or those of my friends, either.

Nice data, but nearly impossible to understand. It would be nice to put at least a couple of big cities (Palo Alto, Fremont, etc) on the map, so that you could understand where's what.

Does anyone know if any of the big real estate sites do this as a feature? It seems like zillow used to have this feature but they switched to a different map provider and could no longer offer it. I recently read a book about making money in real estate and the author suggested that you produce a heat map like this (by hand) for the area that you are interested in investing in.<p>I can't understand why this sort of thing isn't more commonplace. I would like to be able to create animated maps that show the prices over time. Or add in height to show the crime rate over time etc.<p>It seems like real estate is one of those industries with a strong lobby that has been able to resist having its information become a commodity. When I bought my condo I thought the MLS was such a joke.

Great post. Very interesting.<p>One suggestion: please further improve your startup's domain expertise w/r/t Manhattan (I don't know enough about the Bay Area).<p>Nobody I know in Manhattan - and I lived there over 15 years - thinks of South Street Seaport the way you describe it:<p>"The cobblestone streets combined with the low-density feel of the area give it a historical vibe that is second-to-none in the borough."<p>There are cobble-stone streets with low density and a historical feel in Tribeca, which - price aside - virtually all Manhattanites would consider significantly more desirable to live in than South Street Seaport.<p>South Street Seaport is a weird area to live. Very touristy. Far walk to most jobs on Wall St. Far from subways. Not that residential and very windy, since it is on the edge of the city.<p>I had one friend who lived in that area, on Cliff Street.<p>Everyone else was everywhere else.

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I wish the heatmap scale went beyond $3 per square foot.

Price is only part of the story. Because of rent control laws in SF, prices aren't the signals of demand/scarcity they normally are. Showings for average apartments (in older buildings) in SF often have dozens of qualified applicants showing up, making them crapshoots.

It's surprising that Orinda/Lafayette are comparatively cheap now. They've been historically expensive places to live, they've each got good Bart stations, easy access, safety, and access to good food. But, people seem to ignore Lamorinda when looking for a place.

I remember someone telling me that certain areas around/near Palo Alto were considerably cheaper, yet all I see is red/dark-red.<p>Was that BS or is this map wrong?

Can you normalize this by sqft? Size of rentals available likely skews this data, as rdl points out, bigger houses are typically cheaper per sqft.

Nice data, thanks for putting it together. Would be really cool if there was a link to an enlarged version of the table as well.

Any idea on where this data is from?