Whether you’re a real estate professional, a home owner, or shopping for a home, the internet is the perfect place to find out whatever you may need to know about a particular locale. Crime statistics, median home prices, even info on schools is easy to find. But what about your more obscure—or boredom driven—questions about your hometown or the nearby big city? We’ve tracked down five of the most interesting and useful tools for exploring towns and cities the world over, so rev up your ‘net connection and start cruising!
Whether you’re a real estate professional, a home owner, or shopping for a home, the internet is the perfect place to find out whatever you need.
5. Google Maps. A global atlas at your fingertips, everyone who walks, drives or needs to know where something is has used Google Maps at least once. The addition of Google Maps’ Street View has made this tool invaluable for checking out curb appeal, looking into commute routes, and getting a sense of the neighborhood layout.
4. Panoramio. Another photo/map endeavor, this site allows visitors to browse through photos taken and uploaded by other users. Through the wonders of geo-tagging, user photos are displayed on maps according to where they were taken, giving visitors the ability to “see” the world through other people’s camera lenses.
3. Hypercities. This amazing website from the University of California, Los Angeles layers historical maps over modern-day Google Maps. Useful for historians, genealogists, and property history researchers alike, the scaled mapping of these historical maps makes pinpointing the historical context of locations the world over fascinatingly easy.
2. Hindsight from Trulia. Trulia’s interactive maps and tools are legendary, but Hindsight is really something special. Using historical data, the tool shows property development across time, from an area’s earliest settlement until the present day. As the tool slides through the decades, you can see the expansion of population within certain areas, and get a sense of the established vs. newer neighborhoods near your point of interest.
1. Google Earth. Downloadable from Google, this program is the grandmother, granddaddy and great-aunt of all interactive mapping tools. Fly through maps, across 3-D terrains, and zoom into satellite images of places around the globe. If you’ve learned all you needed to know about the grading of a property, or the look of the town, you can take a t
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