PropertyShark, a company that provides detailed online property information and mapping for several major U.S. real estate markets, has launched mapping tools for San Francisco.
Users of the PropertyShark.com Web site can now view building parcel outlines and details about land use, population density, and median household income for San Francisco properties and neighborhood areas. In addition to its map-based tools, PropertyShark also offers property reports for almost every building in San Francisco and a comparable sales tool that estimates a property’s market value.
The company announced a new feature for San Francisco called “bubble maps” that reflect how prices are changing in a given market area, said Ryan Slack, CEO for New York-based PropertyShark. The bubble maps also show the changing value of sales, and the company plans to roll out this tool for other markets as well.
Since launching property research tools for the New York City market in 2003, PropertyShark has expanded to other major markets, including Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Seattle, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, among others.
PropertyShark has plans to provide property information for other San Francisco Bay Area counties within the next six months, including Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
Slack said he expects PropertyShark to cover the top 10 percent of all U.S. counties within a year, which will represent about 65 percent of all housing units and 80 percent of all commercial properties in the nation.
PropertyShark collects data from public sources, and the process is sometimes painstaking, Slack said, as government agencies use many different methods for storing property records. “There is information in every market that’s unique,” he also said, and public property data that’s available in some market areas may not be available in other market areas.
PropertyShark, he said, has a “focus on quality and a focus on depth. The processes (for collecting data) are often very expensive — people going down with laptops, pulling microfiches, and typing stuff in. It’s laborious.”
There are plans to photograph San Francisco-area properties, he said, to add to the site. There are also plans to provide information on foreclosures, he said. While the San Francisco site is now free, the company will eventually require a paid subscription for some of its data offerings, Slack said.
“Our mission is to supply every piece of potential data out there that somebody somewhere has aggregated and we’ll make available,” he said. PropertyShark has been working to provide information on for-sale properties in some markets, Slack also said.
