Online real estate companies are increasingly looking to be one-stop shops for information about neighborhoods where people might want to live. Trulia, part of Seattle-based Zillow Group, added another tool to the mix on Thursday with the debut of Rent Near Transit, a search filter that helps people find rentals near rapid transit stations in select cities.
Trulia is rolling out the tool for renters who are looking near the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), Boston T, Chicago L, New York Subway, Philadelphia SEPTA, and Washington, D.C. Metro transit systems. The tool finds rental listings within a 15-minute walk of the transit systems in those six cities and will also list median rental prices by station.
Median prices can vary greatly within a short distance. Using the San Francisco Bay Area as an example, Trulia says median monthly rents in neighborhoods such as Glen Park and Balboa Park, which are 8-minute and 10-minute BART rides away from downtown San Francisco, respectively, are thousands of dollars cheaper than the median monthly rent in downtown San Francisco.
Trulia cites research which indicates that 69 percent of renters surveyed said that being close to their job, school, or transit is important. The company promotes the idea of staying on its site to calculate all rental needs, including commute times, rather than toggling back and forth between Trulia and a maps platform.
Earlier this week, Seattle-based Redfin introduced a new tool called the Opportunity Score, a rating that measures the number of jobs within a 30-minute, car-free commute of a given address.
