Here’s a tool likely to be useful to armchair developers interested in the lay of the land. PolicyMap is a new GIS website that allows you to view a range of local market and demographic data for Houston or any area of the country. You can see how local crime statistics, an interesting array of mortgage categories (such as the percentage of piggyback, subprime, and refi loans), income distributions, and even donations to presidential candidates look on a map. (Big surprise: Pearland and the Energy Corridor really like John McCain!)PolicyMap is a project of The Reinvestment Fund, a non-profit community-development financial institution from Philadelphia. Some of the advanced features require a subscription, but there’s plenty to play around with for free.

Click here to read this article which appeared on Swamplot May 30, 2008.

By James Wexzilla

Joel Burslem, Founder and author , of one of the best real estate blogs, Future of Real Estate Marketing.com , recently brought attention to , as he describes, a “pretty cool” new site called PolicyMap.com ; the site offers:

“over 4,000 indicators related to demographics, real estate, crime, health, schools, housing affordability, employment, energy, and public investments.” where you can ” Search any location by address, census tract, county, state, zip code, school district, or Congressional district ”.

The information can be viewed in well designed multi-colored maps where you can ” zoom the map to your area of interest: a state, city, zip code, census tract, address, congressional district or school district”.

You can view tables to compare data across places and look at date over time” and “generate reports within specific geography from the community profile, IRS taxReport, housing data, and home mortgage reports and rental housing data.”

In Joel Burslem’s Blog about PolicyMap , he points out that he could “see (him) self possibly using PolicyMap to investigate a move to a new neighborhood”

As a Realtor at Coldwell Banker, I am often asked about specific demographic questions such as racial makeup, religion base, gender, age, criminality, etc…

However, for several reasons, including not knowing such changing data well enough to answer, the actual answers clients are looking for, and most importantly, Fair Housing Laws protecting discrimination, I am not at liberty to discuss.

However, as a Real Estate professional, I want my clients to have the information, they need personally, to make the right decision on where to live for their family. Policy Map provides one of the best tools on the market to point buyers, sellers, investors and Realtors to, as they describe, a “goldmine of information” you need to make an informed buying or selling decision.

Click here to read this article which appeared on Wexzilla on May 24th, 2008.

Posted by: Eric Ames

PolicyMap is a new online service that was created by The Reinvestment Fund, a non-profit organization that funds neighborhood redevelopment. I read about PolicyMap on Future of Real Estate Marketing blog and thought it sounded like an interesting service. When I went to check it out, I was astonished by the amount of information and customization they offered.

Real estate investors or developers who need to do extensive demographic research should definitely check this site out. They offer more than 4,000 different demographic variables for which you can customize maps and reports. They cover the standard ones such as crime, income and so on, but they also have powerful ones you can’t find anywhere else, such as an estimation of a neighborhood’s population in the year 2012 and many others I just don’t have space to mention.

All of this information does not come cheap, however.

They offer limited data and customization for free upon registration, but for the real goodies you have to be prepared to ante up. Their standard subscription starts at $200 a month, and they don’t even publish their premium subscription price. If you are a developer or real estate investor who does a significant amount of deals, though, I think their service is well worth the price. This is especially true if you have to put together presentations for money partners or others as part of your investments. PolicyMap offers data that would make your presentation much better, in addition to tools that should make gathering the data and putting into presentable format much easier.

Click here to read this article which appeared on The Brink Tank by NuWire Investor on Friday May 23rd, 2008.

By Carolyn Said, E-mail Carolyn Said at csaid@sfchronicle.com

Want to know the distribution of household incomes in your neighborhood? How about the percentage of homes that were refinanced a couple of years ago?

A new free online resource offers a way to find such answers and see them graphically displayed on a map, or on reports, charts and tables. PolicyMap.com, which is available now, is sponsored by The Reinvestment Fund, a Philadelphia nonprofit group that seeks to stimulate economic growth for low- and moderate-income families. It offers a wealth of data about housing, mortgages, income and demographics, along with an array of tools to analyze the information. The data cover the entire nation, but are available down to fine-tuned local levels, such as census tracts.

“It was birthed out of our policy work,” said Maggie McCullough, director of PolicyMap. The Reinvestment Fund realized that many of the government agencies, nonprofits and financing sources it works with wanted a map-based way to view data about the areas where they were making investments in housing and other projects, she said. It decided to create PolicyMap to improve access to housing and market data.

PolicyMap draws information from a variety of public and private sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, FBI, IRS and Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. While the data from public sources are available free, some data, such as demographic information PolicyMap purchased from data provider Claritas, are available only with a paid subscription, which starts at $200 a month. Subscribers also have access to more advanced features in generating reports and can upload their own data for analysis. McCullough said about 80 percent of the information on the site is free.

Among the 4,000 data indicators included are home sales, values and projections; neighborhood conditions such as crime, vacant homes and household turnover; mortgage origination information; all kinds of information about incomes (per capita, family, household, area median); demographics such as race, age, household type and size; homeownership and rent rates; and jobs information.

The information is not totally up-to-the minute, however. Most of the data providers update information annually, or quarterly at best, so the most recent version of much of the data is for 2006. PolicyMap said it will update data in sync with the providers’ schedules.

The Web site is at www.policymap.com.

This article appeared on page C – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle on Friday May 23, 2008

I stumbled across two good mapping resources last night. The first is actually a new service available through Google Earth. If you look at the “Layers” now available in Google Earth (in the lower left hand panel) and you check the “Gallery” box, you will discover that there is a new layer there: “Google News”. Check that box and then go wherever you want to go. If Google News has picked up a story from that location, you will see a newspaper icon that you can click on to open up the summary of the story. For more information on this service, take a look at the Google Lat Long Blog.

The second mapping resource is a service called PolicyMap. It only covers the US but does a very good job of layering multiple data sets on the NavTeq mapping API. The service breaks down the data in just about any way you might want to see it: By census tract, by zip code, by Congressional District, etc. It provides good leads for business and CI professionals and Law Enforcement Intel types looking at strategic issues. For example, if I wanted to focus a marketing campaign on the retiree communities in Erie, I might want to use the map below that shows aggregated retiree income by census tract in Erie (darker colors mean more retiree income). Its just a screenshot of part of the data, though; if you want the full map, you will have to go to PolicyMap.com as the service provides no embed feature.

Click here to read this article which appeared on Sources and Methods on Thursday May 22, 2008.

Published by Morgan

I just found out about PolicyMap a new service that lets you map an insane amount of data by region on all subjects ranging from mortgage originations, neighborhood crime stats and income demographics (and tons more).  This could become a killer tool for homeowners looking to buy a home and for real estate agents and mortgage originators to use for everything from farming to advising clients.  It can also be used by lenders to make risk assesments on properties and more.

Since I’m a tech geek at heart this site really appeals to me and could become a useful tool for you.  It’s also an interesting toy to play around with to learn a bit about your neighborhood.

I pulled the below graph for Walnut Creek, CA that shows the percent of all purchase loans in the area that were made with subprime piggyback second financing. This data is pulled from lender’s HMDA reporting and broken down by census tract.

Let’s not overlook the scary fact that in 2006 more than 55% of all subprime purchase loans in the purple areas had piggyback 2nds.  Of course this means that half of the subprime home purchases in these areas were made with zero down payment.

Click here to read this article which appeared on Blown Mortgage Industry on May 22, 2008.

By Joel Burslem

This is pretty cool. PolicyMap is a new site by The Reinvestment Fund (TRF), a national not-for-profit organization that finances neighborhood revitalization.

It’s a Google Maps mashup on steroids.

They offer “4,000 indicators related to demographics, real estate markets, crime, schools, housing affordability, employment, energy, and public investments” all layered on to a map source.

The information gets layered on in color-coded “heat maps” – a trend we’ve seen on many other sites but not nearly to this level before.

There’s a ton of data here.

PolicyMap says they’re pulling all that data from a number of sources including the U.S. Census, Claritas, the FBI, the IRS as well as information from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Boxwood Means (a real estate research firm), among others. It compiles all that data and then scrubs it to ensure that it is reliable and accurate.

I could see myself possibly using PolicyMap to investigate a move to a new neighborhood – or at least seeing how it stakes up against existing tools like Cyberhomes (new facelift btw – nice), Zillow or Trula. No listings though, so it is purely a research tool.

To a real estate investor or developer however, this is a goldmine of information.

To use PolicyMaps you can sign up a free account – and for advanced users they offer additional functionality and access to premium data sources for $200 a month.

Click here to read this article which appeared on Future of Real Estate Marketing on Thursday May 22, 2008