What’s the value of a house in terms of the real estate around it?

When you think about it, a home is more than a foundation and a yard. It’s a neighborhood, a surrounding area.

Sure, you will spend most of your time in the house. But, you will also be spending an incredible amount of time in a 2-5 block region around your home.

MSN recently illustrated this in a slideshow titled, “Your Life in Two Blocks.”

The presentation featured several neighborhoods where people could easily walk to restaurants, museums, stores, parks, etc.

But one could argue, just about any property has an amenity within a 2-5 block area. And savvy real estate professionals would be smart to point this out with a geo-spatial map search tool such as SpatialMatch.

Again, it would be interesting to document how much time people spend within the radius of a small circle around their home.

They are either driving that distance to pick up milk…or dropping off kids at the bus stop…or walking the dog…of going for a morning jog.

Humans like to stretch their boundaries. They don’t want to be confined to the interior of their homes for prolonged periods of time. And, conversely, many times they don’t have a choice and have to constantly venture out to do everything from attending church services to picking up laundry.

And humans also like to interact with other humans. They might meet their fellow citizens on a stroll, or they might meet them at a coffee shop nearby. We’re social animals.

“No matter what time of day, there’s always people walking around,” said one restaurant owner featured in the article.

That’s a detail you might not find in a MLS listing. It’s not something you see listed alongside number on square footage and taxes.

But it’s an important and attractive detail to many. And it’s something you can do to put the icing on the cake for any real estate listing.

With the SpatialMatch tool, you can pull up an MLS listing and position it alongside a map.

From there, using the radius distance sliders, you can point out all the amenities located close to the property.

If the listing is located close to a downtown area, it’s a no-brainer. But maybe the property is not located above the best restaurant in town. You can still point out the geo-spatial advantages.

Maybe there’s a great coffee shop down the street and around the bend that the buyers did not know about.

Or perhaps there is a small dog park two blocks over that most people have never seen.

What about the basics, such as grocery stores?

You can point out where they are located in relation to the property and you can also point out where there are perhaps plans to build a new one in the near future. Everybody loves to shop in a brand new Publix or Whole Foods or Trader Joes.

The point is, there’s is a lot more to a house than a house. There’s a lot more to living than just residing – there’s walking, dining, conversing and imbibing. MSN showed this beautifully in their slide show.

You can use the SpatialMatch tool to show this beautifully on your web site.