We here at Zillow take our research and our analytics very seriously. When working on the Santa’s Top 10 List, we got to our white boards and brainstormed a list of criteria that would make a given city an ideal environment for Santa to work. While we don’t have first-hand experience with elves, flying reindeer, or entering houses via chimney, we did our best to put ourselves in his boots so we could make a list (and fear not, we checked it twice!)
Our Santa Index has six inputs—three are specific to the homes in a city, and three relate to other aspects of the city.
We mined our database of 100million individual homes to get the factors that are specific to the properties in that city.
–Percentage of homes with a fireplace: Fireplaces were used as a proxy for chimneys, and are also where Santa expects the cookies to be
–Percentage of single-story homes: This is a “putting ourselves in his boots” input—If we were Santa, we’d prefer to deliver to single-story homes: less chance of a chimney-related injury AND no creaky stairs to go up or down (less chance of being spotted)
–Percentage of homes with a “large lot”: We define a large lot as over 8000 feet—and a large lots suggests two things: 1) a large “footprint” for the home, so there’s plenty of room for the sleigh and/or a decent sized yard where the reindeer can play while Santa’s busy inside.
We then looked at city-specific data
–Weather: We thought that Santa’s ideal work conditions would be clear skies, but with snow on the ground (both for a wintry feel, and for light-reflective properties), so we rank cities by their December snowfall, clear days in the month, and days with precipitation in the month.
–Percentage of households with children: While we hope Santa does not age-discriminate, we assume that he gets the most utility delivering toys to good girls and boys (vs. adults)
–WalkScore: denser cities make more efficient work for Santa—he loves his job, but he’s got a lot of work to do.
Using all of these inputs (and thanks to the National Climactic Data Center, KidsCount.org for 2000 Census Data, and WalkScore) we weighted each accordingly and created our model. The city-specific data was given a 65% weight and the property-specific data was 35%. Of course, this is just our first attempt… and maybe next year we’ll find get data on city-level increases in cookie baking from December 22 to 24 (assuming that these close-to-Christmas Eve ramp-ups are Santa-specific), or a definitive breakdown of what cities have bigger percentages of nice vs. naughty.