Cool Data on What’s Hot

The Zillow data team has access to a great deal of interesting data on residential real estate values. And sometimes a spreadsheet or a line graph doesn’t tell the story as well as a map. So, we occasionally combine various metrics with geography allowing us to literally picture a real estate market in a city or metro area, and get a better sense of real estate trends.

Here are some examples where we took current Zestimates, divided by the finished square footage of homes and plotted on maps of Seattle and San Francisco. The resulting heat maps show the most expensive home values per square foot. Since the dawn of real estate, the saying has always been “location, location, location”, and these maps certainly show the correlation between neighborhoods and price. Click on the maps below to zoom in.

In Seattle, you can clearly see the effect proximity to water has on a property’s values. Check out the orange and red surrounding Lake Washington, Lake Sammamish and Mercer Island, and lining the shores of Elliott Bay.

In the San Francisco Bay area, notice the red hot-lining of Sausalito and Tiburon in Marin County, as well as higher dollars per square foot in the Marina, Pac Heights, Noe Valley and down the Peninsula into Burlingame and Hillsborough.