Here at Gartoo we recently published a blog post on the commute time, commute cost and mortgage repayment cost of many of the UK’s major cities to identify the best and worst areas to live in for commuters.

However, we realised that looking at long tables of data and graphs isn’t the most exciting and interactive way of presenting the data. We decided to produce a property search info graphic and the following interactive Google map displaying the commute cost, time and mortgage repayment costs for areas in and around London, UK.

London Optimum Location Finder Map

Click on a marker to see the commute time, cost and average monthly mortgage repayment of that area.

View London Property Price vs. Commute Time & Cost in a larger map

Google Maps goes beyond standard data visualisation
For a property search engine like Gartoo.co.uk, the ability to pour data into an interactive Google map is a brilliant way of showing multiple variables to help people searching for a home to compare areas, but lets face it, there’s nothing new about property search engines displaying property data on a map!

The real advantage of using Google maps to display this data is that people are already very familiar with how to use the different functions and with the recent addition of Google street views (the orange man above the zoom slider) people are able to take a virtual walk around the areas that they might consider living in – an incredibly useful feature that is not supported by many property search engines.

In January Gartoo researched the combined house and commute costs of areas around London to try and find the optimum location for someone working in central London to live, the results were staggering.

Every five miles nearer to Bedford one lives from St. Pancras a monthly average saving of £515 is made on combined mortgage repayment and commute costs.

Moving from Camden to Potters Bar – an added journey time of 17 minutes a day – could save £1,234 per month in combined travel and mortgage repayment costs.

So why do people still choose to live in non optimum locations such as Camden?

Londoners are irrational

One very clear point that was highlighted by our results was that people’s home purchasing decisions are far from rational. For example, out of the towns sampled Richmond turned out to be the worst value area near London where the average three-bedroom house price is £703,000 and a commute into Central London takes 53 minutes.  A rational home hunter working in Central London would nowadays buy a house in Stratford because the area is the best value spot: the average three-bedroom house price is £262,000 and a commute into Central London takes 16 minutes.

To illustrate the comparison of the different areas sampled we produced a visual representation comparing commute cost, commute time, distance and average mortgage repayment cost – click the image above to open the full visualization in a new window.

So where’s the best value area to live?

Whilst it can be financially sensible to commute long distances to London, the trend of increasing travel costs above inflation and the increasing travel times are quickly closing the gap to the cost of living in London. Our research concluded that Bedford and Stratford are currently the two best value areas in terms of the relative cost of housing versus travel time, but whether these areas will continue to be the best value in the next year or even six months is uncertain, particularly with the 2012 Olympic developments occurring in Stratford.

In an attempt to try to see whether this trend occurred in other cities or just London we collected the same data for the UK’s second and third largest cities – Edinburgh and Birmingham. Interestingly, we noticed a similar pattern but on a far smaller scale – On average, a total saving of £133/month is made every 2 miles from the centre’s of Birmingham and Edinburgh, but only in a single direction, which is due to the Hoyt urban land use model on which both cities were built upon.

Click here to view the full report of house prices and commuters data.

The solution

We displayed a ‘buy’ and a ‘rent’ button next to the search box. Admittedly, we just didn’t know whether users would prefer to hit a button to precise the transaction type they were interested in.

The reality check

We found out later that users do search properties for sale and only when they are interested in letting, they include a keyword in the query, eg “to rent”, “rental”, etcSo we tried another solution: showing results only for the transaction type “buy” and simplify the interface with a single button reading “search”. Users with an interest in renting instead of buying would only need to type a term relative to renting in their query.

You may also notice that we can upper case a few sensible words on the queries, such as location names (“North Folk” in the example) but not verbs (eg. “to let”).

What does Gartoo understand now

In most cases, Gartoo determines whether a query with the terms of house types such as “cottage” are more related to a property type “house” that, for instance a “flat”. The software generally finds whether the query is about rent or sale, identifies many locations by their name and interprets the number of bedrooms specified in the query.
For instance writing on Gartoo the query “2 bedroom flat to rent in SW8” results in property listings of flats with rent prices in the postcode SW8 in London. You don’t need to tell the engine, it will understand it for you. We do even preset the filter options to property type ‘flat’ and no. of bedrooms.

Example of queries that Gartoo can understand: Houses to rent in SW6, Renting in Woodstock, Property rent in Hutton, Rent flats in London W1, Flats in Central Grange, etc.