NabeWise – Find Where You Fit

Everyone has a niche. Using NabeWise, you can figure out where you’ll fit in best in some of the most popular cities in the country. Using a series of metrics, reputation indicators, and user reviews, NabeWise can help anyone discover the perfect neighborhood to live in permanently or stay in while visiting a new city on vacation.

Before you travel across the country to look for apartments in a brand new city, you’d be smart to click onto NabeWise and have a look around online. Search by city, zip code, address, or neighborhood to find out more information about wherever it is you’re heading, or click on the name of a city from NabeWise’s drop down box and click on the word that describes what’s most important to you. NabeWise lets you choose by trendiness, safety, or family friendliness, to name a few. Once you’ve entered your preferences, click “Find my nabes!” and NabeWise will come up with an interactive map that lists the more desirable areas of town. Click on the map to see a neighborhood’s rankings in a number of related categories, as well as the keywords that are most frequently used to describe it. If you like what you see, then click on the neighborhood directly to view even more detailed information – including public school data, real estate values, and safety rankings – about that area of town.

Not only can you learn about neighborhoods on NabeWise, but you can rate them, too. NabeWise encourages users to rate and review their own neighborhoods as a way to let outsiders know what they’re missing out on. Users can even add photos and videos to give tourists and potential new neighborhoods a better idea of what they’re getting into before making a major move.

Practical Uses:

• Get help deciding where to move after graduation
• Check crime rates to make sure you’re not moving to an unsafe neighborhood
• Post reviews of your own neighborhood online
• Find hotels that are located in a family-friendly part of town

Insider Tips:

• Registered users can post reviews, photos, and videos of their own neighborhoods
• School data comes from GreatSchools.org
• Reputation tags are based on the phrases that come to mind when people hear about a particular neighborhood
• NabeWise crowd sources content from other social networking sites, to give people a complete picture of what it’s like to live in a particular neighborhood

What we liked:

• Tourists can use NabeWise to help select a hotel or create an itinerary
• Looking up crime data and school information on NabeWise is more efficient than looking it up through city records
• People can pick a neighborhood based on how many beautiful people live there
• NabeWise can help people decide where to live when they’re moving to a new town

What we didn’t like:

• NabeWise is still not available in many cities

Alternatives:

• LocalBlox – http://localblox.com
• NeighborhoodScout – http://www.neighborhoodscout.com
• Walk Score – http://www.walkscore.com

Company Info:

• Launched: January 2010
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: New York, New York
• Founded by: Ann Montgomery
• Web site: http://nabewise.com

Costs:

• Free