With an eye on attracting prospective homebuyers, the Houston Association of Realtors has rolled out a search-by-commute tool on its new statewide website.
“We operate under a ‘give the consumer what they want’ perspective at HAR,” said HAR President and CEO Bob Hale in a statement.
“We are proud to be able to offer this to people across the state before any of the third-party portals. It is another example of why HAR.com is the best source of information Texas real estate consumers are seeking, promoting the connection between consumers and Realtors.”
The tool, INRIX Drive Time, allows users to enter any address, their desired drive time, and other search parameters such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms to produce a map of available property listings that fall within that drive time.
The tool is available on HAR’s statewide website, beta.har.com, but not on its local site, har.com. The statewide site is still in beta and there is no date set yet for its official launch.
HAR’s implementation of INRIX Drive Time is unique in that it shows “all of the various ways commute times can be used to remove the guesswork of finding the perfect home,” said Kevin Foreman, INRIX’s general manager of GeoAnalytics, in a statement.
HAR has not only placed the tool on the beta site’s home page, giving it its own landing page, but also added it to every detailed listing page, school page, apartment detailed page, home value page and sold detailed page, said HAR Chair Nancy Furst.
“Texans are so dependent on their cars that it only makes sense that consumers should be able to conduct a real estate search based on their commute time,” she said in a statement.
Houston is America’s 15th-worst traffic city, according to an INRIX annual report.
Last year, North Carolina’s Triangle MLS updated its member iPad app with INRIX Drive Time, becoming the first multiple listing service to offer the tech to its membership, though it did not make the tool available directly to consumers. CoreLogic signed a deal in November 2013 to make the tool available to MLSs.
In July, Re/Max rolled out the tool on remax.com and more than 50,000 agent websites nationwide. Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices was the first national website to license the tool.
