Finding the perfect house using open data

The biggest users of the open data movement are, in fact, real estate professionals. It's companies like Trulia and Estately and Zillow and what not that are actually taking open data from government and putting it to good use.

It'd be interesting to see some kind of startup come out of this. Though it's fairly hands-on, real estate is still a fairly hands on market, and with real estate lobbying being what it is, it's likely that agents aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Building them tools that allow them to make better recommendations to their clients or to find better buyers might be something really interesting.

Don't forget http://www.redfin.com ; their presentation of properties with the associated public data is beautiful.

No association, just a huge fan.

Great, way to go!

Reminds me of Bill Gates book "The Road Ahead" (1st ed, 1995, p. 158) - it's about his vision of a next-gen network that would replace the middle-man beside other innovative things:

  [...] most market places are very inefficient. For 
  instance, if you are trying to find a doctor, lawyer, 
  accountant, or similar professional, or are buying a house,
  information is incomplete and comparisons are difficult 
  to make.
  The information highway will extend the electronic 
  marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between, the 
  universal middleman. Often the only human involved in a 
  transaction will be the actual buyer and seller. All the 
  goods for sale in the world will be available for you to
  examine, compare, and, often, customize. When you want to
  buy something you'll be able to tell your computer to 
  find it for you at the best price offered by any 
  acceptable source or ask your computer to 'haggle' with 
  the computers of various sellers. Information about 
  venders and their products will be available to any 
  computer connected to the highway. Servers distributed 
  worldwide will accept bids, resolve offers into completed 
  transactions, control authentication and security, and 
  handle all other aspects of the marketplace, including 
  the transfer of funds. This will carry us into a new 
  world of low-friction, low-overhead capitalism, in which 
  market information will be plentiful and transaction 
  costs low. It will be a shopper's heaven. [...]

Where do you get the house listing data? Do you then geo code the addresses and filter them against your acceptable locations?

(Sorry if I missed reading that part)

Are you referring to real estate listings? In my case, I use Trulia to search the zones after I narrow down the locations. However, if you're referring to the building footprints I have a Make target that pulls GIS data from public sources: https://github.com/caged/portland-atlas