Among the choices influencing our lifestyle, the choice of the place to live is one of the most powerful. Depending on the location in which we decide to settle down, we’ll be more or less able to walk, drive, cycle and ride public transports, and we’ll have more or less jobs and business opportunities.

Real estate companies are catching this trend, and developing better and better search engines. Today I will show you walkscore.com .

Walkscore is an evaluation tool about the walkability of a neighborhood: you insert the address of the house you would like to buy, and it will give you all the amenities situated within walking distance from your home, and a score resuming the degree of pedestrian-friendliness of the neighborhood. Real estate websites can embed Walkscore code in their page, and show the score of any estate they have for sale.

Some things still need to be implemented: the search engine doesn’t take public transports and natural obstacles into account, and results outside the U.S. seem to have lower values than the ones in the states. But the idea is really, really interesting!

(source: NRDC)