The Area lens

The Area lens

The Area lens is the optional color layer on the Browse map. It shades each census tract by one signal at a time so you can see neighborhood context — where flips have been resold fastest, where rents cover prices best, where property taxes bite hardest — before you look at any single home.

What the colors mean

Every percentile lens is a service-area percentile (0–100), computed across Cook + Lake census tracts rather than separately by county. Five color steps span the range; gray means the signal is not tracked for that area (see Data coverage) — gray is never a zero.

Consumer lenses: Flip score and Rental score (area-level strategy screens), Market heat (sale-to-list competition), Effective tax, Section 8 bonus (voucher rent vs market rent), and Commute. Investor view adds allowed property/market factors such as renovation momentum, appreciation, days-on-market, flood calls, governance burden, housing-stock age, job growth, and FHA depth. Income, crime, crime-mix, and the current income-contaminated capital-flow composite are withheld from public lenses. Each lens shows a one-line “why it matters” next to its legend.

What the colors do NOT mean

An area color is location context, never a property verdict. A home in a 95th-percentile flip tract can still be a bad flip at its price, and the engine will say so: property-level strategy fits are computed from that home’s own economics, hard-gated against its own math, and shown on the card and property page. The two can disagree — that disagreement is information, not a bug.

Area strategy screens are built from public-record signals (assessor sales, HMDA lending, permits, HUD rent standards, market aggregates) refreshed on the cadence listed in data sources. Where a lens blends several public signals client-side, the legend labels it as a screen.

Automated signals — not an appraisal, not advice, and never a statement about the people who live anywhere. See limitations and fair housing.