Map Gadgets and Real Estate Bloggers

Many of y'all might find it amusing that when my wife and I got serious about actually buying a home we picked a Realtor based on his... blog. Joe Peffer did a fine job patiently getting us into the right Bexley home (I think it was the 1st, 12th, and 15th house he took us to), and he has continued to constantly improve www.columbushomeblog.com. His most recent post highlights a nifty little map applicaton called 'Hindsight' from the real estate website Trulia. What it does is plot little dots on the map year by year from the mid nineteenth century to the present that represent each new house (or a representative sample, depending on the scale of the map) in an animated format. Mapping Bexley shows how my neighborhood sprouted up almost overnight in the 1920s. Mapping Akron shows distinct concentric rings sprouting up every couple of decades in the first half of the 20th century. It's fun.

p.s. I just found this post on Joe's blog. I was one of those customers. He deserved the award, and he didn't ask me to say any of this.