After a wonderfully fun — and occasionally frustrating — evening of hacking around, I’m please to present this mashup of Bay Area housing price trends. The graphs are from our friends at Altos Research, and the Google Maps were created using Zeemaps from Zeesource.

For a larger map, click here.

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Now ya don’t have to be a programming genius to put together neat mashups. I put this together using Altos Research data and a Zeesource map.

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My trusty Realtor-mobile (R) for the last few years has been a Honda CRV. It’s a great mini-SUV, with plenty of room to throw stuff in the storage area and some clients in the back seats. To use a Greg Swann-ism, gas mileage is “not awful.”

For most people, the difference between 20 mpg and 35 mpg is noticeable, but not painful; in my case, with all the time I spend on the road, it’s a small fortune. That’s why my next Realtor-mobile (R) will have to a hybrid.

What leads me to putting on all those miles? Pretty simple: I need to stay on top of the real estate market, and in particular I need to aware of the “unZillowables” of each potential property that clients may be interested in. The online sites and tours give a good feel, and I’m often able to eliminate properties based purely on that; in most cases, however, I need to actually visit the property to determine how well it will suit each client’s needs.

Turns out I’ve been doing a lot of that. I built a little Access app that sucks listings from the MLS and enables me to write reviews for clients about each property. Turns out in the last year I’ve done over 2000 property reviews. Now, this doesn’t mean I’ve visited 2000 properties — if I see a property on the MLS, I’ll review it once based on that, and then write another review once I’ve seen it. If I have two potential clients for a property, that’s two reviews. So while I may not have visited 2000 properties in the last year, I’ve still put a fair amount of mileage on my car.

Thanks to Zeemaps I can map all the real estate listings I’ve seen up and down the Peninsula. The different color pins indicate different levels of suitability for clients; click on one of the pins for more information on that particular listing. For obvious reasons of confidentiality, I haven’t included the actual property write-up I did for each of them.

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