One of the first things people shopping for a house want to know is how agonizing the commute will be. It’s not that hard to get an idea of how bad the pain will be in this era of smartphones and apps. You can punch your work address into Google Maps while you’re standing in front of your dream house to get a ballpark estimate of how long you will spend in a car, on a bus or riding a bike to your office. A start-up called Walk Score even has a search engine that lets you find apartment listings within a selected commuting range â€" say, a half-hour by bus or 15 minutes by car.
On Tuesday, the largest real estate firm in the Pacific Northwest, Windermere, took another step toward making commuting time estimates more precise. Windermere licensed an online tool from a company called Inrix that gives those shopping for homes an hour-by-hour prediction of the drive times to their workplaces.
Windermere presents the commuting times in a chart on the detail page for each property on its site. The line on the chart indicating drive times often ends up looking like the head of a dog, with spikes during the morning and evening rush hours that look like canine ears. Windermere executives believe that presenting would-be home buyers with more precise commuting times during their initial Web searches for properties will help prevent transactions from souring later.
“If you can eliminate objections sooner in the process, it means you’re going to close the deal that much faster,†said York Baur, chief executive of Windermere Solutions, the technology arm of the real estate firm.
Inrix’s commute estimates are based on more than 100 million drivers around the world who have navigation systems in their cars that anonymously report their locati! ons and speed to Inrix. That, combined with data Inrix gets from road sensors and other sources, allows it to figure out how badly traffic is likely to slow.
It updates its drive time estimates every 90 days to reflect changing road conditions â€" for example, a major highway project that creates a commute-snarling detour for months. The company even has algorithms that weed out anomalies, like people stopping to change a spare tire, said Kevin Foreman, general manager of geoanalytics for Inrix.
Inrix’s hourly drive time estimates and those from other sources are often pretty close. Walk Score calculates the average commuting time between a block in San Francisco’s Sunset district and a building in the city’s financial district as 21 minutes, while Inrix estimates it at 22 minutes during the peak morning commute and 24 minutes during the peak evening commute.
There seems to be a bigger spread between estimates the farther the distance driven. For instance, Walk Score shows an averagedrive time of 38 minutes between an address in West Seattle and Tacoma, 34 miles apart. Inrix estimates that the morning and evening peak commutes between the same spots are typically 43 and 46 minutes each.
A difference of eight minutes in a commute is meaningful. Over the course of a year, that adds up to almost 67 extra hours of drive time.
