Walkability Comes to MyNewPlace

MyNewPlace and Walk Score Team Up to Promote Walkable Apartments

"Location, location, location" has long been the cornerstone of the real estate industry. (The top apartment search sites – as selected by the tech-savvy readers of Lifehacker – all incorporate map-based search into their interfaces.) Now, MyNewPlace (MNP) is taking the notion of prime location to the next level by working with Walk Score to deliver more information to apartment hunters using their site. (MNP is no stranger to working with third-party sites to add interactive features to their listings.)

According to MNP, they are now the first major apartment search site to incorporate the Walk Score walkability ratings on every listing. Users will be able to sort apartment listings by their Walk Score, which should provide the prospect with a better snapshot of the surrounding neighborhood. One can presume that better informed prospects typically make for more qualified leads for apartment marketers. (More on this in a bit...)

In case you're not familiar with Walk Score, it's a website that rates a property’s walkability by analyzing the address to determine what sort of amenities are within walking distance. The higher the walk score, the more "walkable" a location should be. Walkability can be attractive to prospects looking for a neighborhood with easy access to all the conveniences of daily life – grocery stores, restaurants, schools, public transportation, etc. Here's one look at how the Walk Score ratings are integrated into MNP listings:

Why Add WalkScore?
MyNewPlace believes that the addition of Walk Score to their listings reflects renters’ emphasis on neighborhood information when choosing an apartment. One of MNP's recent surveys found that 79% of renters said that local information was an important factor in selecting what apartment to pick. With Walk Score built into MyNewPlace listings, renters are now able to get a true feel for the neighborhood and determine if it will be a good fit for their lifestyle. (What else are you doing to promote your property's neighborhood?)

Apartment marketers may think they have the best location – good neighborhood, great local attractions – but this feature will allow prospects to see that for themselves. By including walkability scores in their apartment searches, MNP believes they'll be able to deliver owners a distinctive competitive advantage.

The integration appears to be part of a two-way partnership. While Walk Score offers their own embeddable "real estate tiles," MyNewPlace is also powering an embeddable Walk Score Walkable Apartments widget – you can grab it here. MyNewPlace is also sharing data with Walk Score, showing how many apartments are available in the metro area searched by the user:


For more information, check out the announcement on the MyNewPlace blog.

My take: It's not an earth-shattering announcement, but it's encouraging to see that MyNewPlace continues to add new features to their listings. 'Renters by choice' are looking for convenience, and the Walk Score data could be an interesting way to deliver that information without the prospect leaving the site. I'm curious to know if apartment marketers with suburban properties can turn the feature off if they're concerned about their score, and I look forward to hearing from MNP down the road about how features like these influence the effectiveness of their advertisers' listings.

What do you think? Will apartment hunters use this new feature? And if they do, how big of a factor is walkability in the apartment selection process? Is there any downside to this partnership?

Apartment Search Goes Social ... Almost

MyNewPlace, a site that lists apartment and home rentals site, today announced that it has added Facebook Connect to its site. The feature allows its users to get feedback on prospective apartments, condos and home rentals by posting property information to their Facebook page. MyNewPlace claims to be the first real estate and apartments Web site to implement Facebook Connect, allowing consumers to tap into their network of online friends to make more informed decisions about where to live.

Mark Moran, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for MyNewPlace, had this to say about the new feature:

Most people want the opinion of friends, family and roommates before choosing a new place to live. Facebook's more than 150 million users can now quickly and easily log into MyNewPlace using their Facebook account, post properties they are interested in to their Facebook page and get feedback and advice from the people that are most important to them. With Facebook Connect, getting opinions from friends and family is as simple as a click.

Traffic to MyNewPlace appears to be growing rapidly in recent months -– the company claims that over 3 million people use the site monthly. MyNewPlace's internal research indicates that over one third of its visitors already have a Facebook account, which seems quite low to me based on recent data about Facebook's amazing growth.

Trying It Out
Trying the new feature out didn't go so well. Signing in was easy enough, there's a big "Connect with Facebook" button on the sign-in page.

Once a user signs in, they can search for properties like normal. When the user selects a property, they'll see the property profile, which now includes an option to "Post to Facebook":

The user can make a short comment on the property, and a listing then gets posted to the user's Facebook page:

Pretty cool, eh?

Here's where it starts to get less exciting. As a Facebook user, the whole point of posting a property like this to my profile like this would be to have my friends comment on the community and tell me what they think about it, or better yet, what their experiences were if they lived there in the past.

Facebook typically allows users to share posted information like this with their friends through the feature called a "newsfeed." It makes (almost) every interaction on the site a more social experience, and it's a huge reason why Facebook is as popular as it is today.

Well, here's the problem ... the posting from MyNewPlace doesn't automatically get shared with the user's friends through the newsfeed. Which means those friends probably won't have any idea when that person posts a property for comment, unless they go directly to that person's profile page. Others also tried it without any luck.

It misses the most social aspect of the entire site.

When I asked the MyNewPlace rep about the feature (via Twitter), this was the response I received:

Our app allows FB (Facebook) users to post to their profiles. FB shows what it deems to you RE your friends on your home page.

Great ... the feature only works if Facebook wants it to. Well, here's to hoping that Facebook wants features like this to work as much as I do. There is huge potential for multifamily websites to embrace these types of features that enable their prospects and residents to easily share information about the property with their friends.

It will be interesting to see how MyNewPlace works through these issues, how they promote this feature to their users, and how they push similar "sharing" features into the site in the future. They also have a website-building tool, called MyNewSite ... it could be very interesting if they incorporate the Facebook Connect feature directly into their property website templates.

Have you tried the new MyNewPlace Facebook Connect feature? What did you think? How else can other ILS providers and property websites take advantage of social networks like this?