Location-based data and information provider Maponics LLC plans to add subdivision boundaries to its offerings this spring, which the company says will be a useful tool for consumers and real estate professionals conducting online property searches or researching market trends.
Maponics — which already provides neighborhood and school attendance boundaries for a number listing portals, including Realtor.com — says it expects to have 100,000 to 200,000 subdivision boundaries defined for a May launch of the new product.
The number of subdivisions with defined boundaries is expected to grow to more than 500,000 by the end of the year, and more than 1 million by the summer of 2012, said Maponics’ Mark Friend.
"We’re working closely with Realtors Property Resource on this, which should help compress (the) market adoption timeline," Friend said.
RPR, a subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors, is building a national property database that combines public records with data from participating multiple listing services. The company is already licensing Maponics neighborhood and school attendance boundary definitions.
"Maponics subdivision boundaries are a natural extension of their neighborhood data, as they provide more granularity and coverage for the areas that define the communities around properties in the ways our users actually think about them," said RPR President Marty Frame in a statement.
In the suburbs, subdivision boundaries are typically the smallest defined grouping of properties, ranging from a few homes inside a gated community to a development with hundreds of properties.
Maponics says until now there’s been no "reliable and systematic" source for subdivision boundary data. The company says it’s filed for a patent on a process that blends geographic information system (GIS) information and public records to create "highly accurate boundaries."
