A friend of mine owns a fabulous penthouse apartment on the upper east side of New York City, one that she and her husband bought something like 10 years ago, before they had begun to contemplate having children. When their daughter arrived and they started thinking about schools, they were quite shocked to discover that their home was actually zoned into one of the worst-performing districts in Harlem. Not at all what they expected, and they spend months and thousands of dollars figuring out an alternative.
Now, my friends weren’t exactly planning for their daughter. But we all know that schools districts are one of the primary reasons that people buy homes in certain zip codes. If you’re off by even one block, it can make a huge difference — not only in where your child will be getting an education but in what you can expect to cough up for taxes. Quite frankly, in states like mine (New Jersey), this is even a bigger deal right now.
In any event, people care. Even I care, and I don’t have any children.
That’s why I was intrigued to hear about a new geographic information system (GIS) software application from Maponics that includes very specific information about the school attendance zones associated in public school districts. The application, Maponics School Boundaries, also includes private and public school locations and profiles.
The reason this is apparently so compelling is that, today, would-be home buyers have to research this information at the local level. Much of this information is self-reported and there aren’t any maps showing specific zones around a given school that send students. Maponics will be working with local school districts to collect this information and keep it updated. In a statement, Maponics CEO Darrin Clement said, “This product represents an important milestone for Maponics and addresses a fundamental demand in the real estate industry to establish a direct association between properties and corresponding school attendance zones.”
eNeighborhoods, which is a Webs site service that supports pretty much every big name real-estate company and franchise you can think of, plans to include this information in its software for real-estate professionals. Here’s a comment from the company’s vice president, Andy Woolley:
“With their school boundaries product, Maponics is providing the means for parents to quickly and easily see public school options relative to property locations. This addresses a fundamental need in real estate search, and we are actively looking at how we’d incorporate the school boundary data into our real estate search to offer a better user experience.”
The initial release contains information for 20 percent of the K-12 student population in the United States, and 100 percent coverage at the school district level (although maybe not the specific schools within that district). Maponics says plans to keep increasing the student population covered by more than 20 percent per quarter until it covers the entire student population.
