Neighborhood Scout itself is worthless. There is better information in the Internet for free, for example at http://www.city-data.com/. They will automatically renew your subscription and won’t refund. I had to close my credit card to get rid of these parasites.

We appreciate your feedback on our post about Neighborhood Scout and the great insider tips for our readers! It was especially helpful to point out how it is most effective to set the price range before you run your search so you can get more accurate results.

We definitely agree that there is no one best neighborhood for everyone and the choice of which neighborhood best suites home buyers is a very personal decision. As such, we encourage San Mateo County home buyers to educate themselves about each neighborhood so they can make the best decision for their current situation. As we are all very busy these days, we like to give our readers information about websites like yours to assist them in weeding out the neighborhoods that will not meet their specifications before they devote too much time viewing properties in that area.

Thanks again for your feedback and very best of luck with your website!

The Living Well in San Mateo Team

Thank you for taking the time to share with readers your experiences with NeighborhoodScout.com, the neighborhood search engine which I created. Creating NeighborhoodScout has been a passion of love – I love the subject, I enjoy uncovering surprising insights about cities, towns, and neighborhoods that some might never know about, and I am driven by my desire to put the power of making good choices in the hands of each and every person, before they buy a home – which is the largest single purchase for most Americans.

Upon reading your review, it came to my mind that you may have missed the power of our search engine. That is, each choice to find the best neighborhoods on our Find Tab has a unique set of advanced options so that any user can customize the search to fit them, including their home price range.

For first-time home buyers, for example, if you click the plus sign on the blue module that says ‘advanced options’ the site will fold out a set of search options that will allow each user to customize the search to their personal needs. Since a neighborhood that is affordable for first-time home buyers in the San Mateo area will be a different price than a first-time home buyer neighborhood in, say, Souix Falls, South Dakota, we let the user select the median house value that is right for them. If you do not select one, the search engine returns resutls as if ‘price is no object.’ No one price range will fit all first-time home buyers, especially home buyers in different areas of the country, so that is why we built the searches to be very customizable, and flexible to meet the needs of different people and families, including people who are doing research.

If you select the best neighborhoods for crime rates, and then select advanced options, you will see that you can search by crime inex (both violent and property crime), violent crime rate, property crime rate, and even crimes per square mile. You can also select to find the safest neighborhoods, or the most dangerous, or anywhere in-between, for total crime, violent crime, property crime, or crime density (crimes per square mile). You can even add to your ‘safe neighborhood search by choosing a house value, so you can find both a safe neighborhood and one that fits your budget. Each and every search is run on the fly and customized for that user. You can produce maps and data for any area, using any of these tools.

Another part of our site that you did not mention is the different tabs of data for neighborhoods below the map. The overview tab tells about price, types of homes (including age, size, and type), demographics, lifesyle, and more.

But we also have tabs with equal or even greater depth of data and charts for public schools, crime rates, and appreciation rates. You can even see the quarterly appreciation rate by neighborhood, for every neighborhood in America. Our school data uses a patent-pending method to nationally standardize NCLB test scores for true comparison (e.g., ‘is our school rated as an 85 in California as good as a school rated as an 85 in Arizona?”) On the crime tab, we even show you your chance of becoming a victim of violent or property crime for any neighborhood in America, compared to the city in which the neighborhood exists, and the state, as well as the nation.

These are all tools built to help empower all Americans to make the best decisions for them and their families. My mantra is ‘there is no one best neighborhood for everyone. But there are best neighborhoods for each person. I hope that NeighborhoodScout – my baby – can help each of us find a little heaven that is just right for us, no matter which area we live in. Your best neighborhood may be just a few miles from where you are right now, and you don’t even know it. I know that happened to me when my wife and I had our first daughter and built a house in a not-so-great school district, when a great school district was just 2 miles away.

Happy hunting, and thank you again for your thoughtful review. It meant a lot to me.

Warmest regards,

Andrew

Andrew Schiller, PhD
President
http://www.NeighborhoodScout.com