You’ve Found Your Dream Home! Is The Neighborhood Safe?

June 6, 2011 (Chris Moore)

You’ve worked hard, you’ve skimped and saved for that down payment, you feel like you’ve been to a hundred websites looking at a thousand homes, filled out all that paperwork and now you’ve finally found your dream home…but is the neighborhood safe?

Everyone starts out with a big wish list. Was it 3 or 4 bedrooms? Two or three baths? Single-family home or a condo? And the schools! They had to have good schools! But one of the top priorities on any wish list is a safe neighborhood. Now you can find out if that dream home is really a dream with just a couple clicks of a mouse.

Trulia.com has introduced a new service to its product suite called Crime Maps. An innovative and proprietary social crime mapping technology that allows consumers to view, explore, compare, interact and comment on crime data across the US.

By partnering with a variety of other websites who work with hundreds of police agencies, crime feeds, and news outlets, Trulia has created a curated map of criminal activity in many metropolitan areas.

Initially available in 50 counties, users have a variety of options available at their fingertips that allows them to view crimes in a particular neighborhood or toggle between different neighborhoods and compare crime statistics.

Crime Maps even lets you add your own insights to a particular neighborhood, and add comments and advice through Facebook’s Social Comments.

To keep the information as up to date as possible, Crime Maps automatically displays the last 2,500 crimes committed in a given area including thefts, assaults, burglaries, arrests, and vandalism.

“Historically, detailed and easy-to-decipher crime reports haven’t been easily accessible to the average citizen, and Trulia aims to bring that data to light at the most important moment – when people are deciding where they should live,” said Pete Flint, co-founder and CEO, Trulia. “As a business, Trulia continues to move beyond public record data to in order to add more depth and details about what it’s like to live in a neighborhood. We’re leveraging the acquisition of the Movity team to build visual and innovative mapping platforms and integrate social features into the core of our user experience.”

The service is available for renters too. You worked hard to find that house…find out if it’s a neighborhood you want to live in.

Check out Crime Maps here.

Tags: Trulia, Crime Maps, single-family home, crime, condo, criminal activity, safe neighborhoods