Maponics LLC, a Vermont-based provider of mapping data products including city, neighborhood and school boundaries, plans to start providing data sets that provide insight into demographics, real estate trends, school rankings and crime synced with the company’s real-life geographic boundaries.
By providing lifestyle and behavioral analytics, Maponics Context, will free the company’s clients from having to "search for, acquire and cobble together data in a piecemeal manner," said Maponics founder and CEO Darrin Clement.
Companies like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com and Century 21 Real Estate license Maponics boundary data for school attendance zones, neighborhoods, subdivisions and ZIP codes.
Now Maponics plans to begin supplying info like real estate analysis, foreclosure activity, demographics, school rankings and crime layered on top of its proprietary boundary info.
"We’ve built a nice set of polygons (boundaries) over the last decade," Clement said. But some of the firm’s customers have been asking for more, he said.
Maponics’ three main boundary products are neighborhoods (with 160,000 mapped in the U.S.), subdivisions (which now number about 1 million), and school attendance zones, he said.
 Darrin Clement |
"There’s lots of insight from just knowing where something is," Clement said. But with qualitative data on top of location data, insights multiply, he said. And that’s what Context offers.
Need to find the median income of those living in Chinatown? "That doesn’t exist anywhere but in Maponics," Clement said, because of the firm’s sophisticated and multisourced neighborhood boundary information,
With "brute force research" and a multifaceted approach, "we’ve effectively mapped the predominant perception of where a neighborhood begins and ends," Clement said. It’s that boundary info, with analytics applied to the firm’s geographic boundaries, where the product provides a powerful tool.
The first five Context products — analytics for real estate, foreclosure, demographics, school rankings and crime — will be available in early February, Clement said.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the second and third quarters, Maponics will release more Context products, for a total of 16 total, that dive even deeper into what there is to know about a particular location — weather, transit, mobility, traffic, leisure and commerce, and proximity to bodies of water and streams.
"Some of the actual scores we’re releasing have never been done before," Clement said.
The first five to be released in February, though not as niche, provide some new insights, he said.
Real estate analytics will be updated quarterly and be composed of two data sets, derived from public records: inventory makeup (total number of residential properties, percent owner-occupied, percent residential versus commercial, average square foot, etc.) and sales info (average sales price, loan-to-value estimates, whether the area’s seen depreciation or appreciation, etc.), said Michael Moshay, vice president for contextual analytics at Maponics.
Foreclosure analytics will be updated quarterly and sourced from public records as well, Moshay said. The product will include info like the total number of defaults within a certain geography, average number of days that bank-owned properties remained on the market, and what percentage of homes in the area have been in foreclosure.
The real estate and demographics products have two data sources, he said: the U.S. Census Bureau and the consumer behavior metric firm Nielsen.
Nielsen breaks down populations into 60 different demographic segments like "soccer mom" or "millennial." This kind of data will give Maponics customers ideas of things like media habits and income for those in a neighborhood, subdivision or ZIP mapped by Maponics, Moshay said.
The school rankings product will rank schools based on standardized testing data. Since each state is different, Maponics will rank them only against others in the state where they’re located. Details about the schools will include the grade levels served and student-teacher ratio.
The crime product will be the last of the first five products to be released. Using data sourced from third parties and FBI crime statistics, it will show a crime score built from three components: overall crime, personal safety and property safety.
The last round of the 16 Maponics Context products is scheduled to be released in the third quarter of 2013.
