A CRAFTY Scot has developed a handy mapping tool to help hopeful house-hunters scope out locations in Edinburgh before buying.
An interactive map put together by one helpful Scot offers in-depth details of all the areas of Edinburgh for those looking to move into or around Auld Reekie.
The tool, which hopes to show potential homeowners everything they could ever want to know about neighbourhoods, resembles Google Maps and allows users to drop a pin on any street in the city.
It then provides extremely detailed information on the pinned location ranging from house price to chance of flooding, with further details like safety, schools in the catchment area and more recently being added.
The innovative tool was designed to help those looking to move home in the capital but is also available for a number of other Scots cities including Aberdeen and Glasgow.
An extraordinary amount of detail on pinned locations is shared with users in an easily accessible manner.
The map allows users to check noise level, pricing, flooding risk, area wellbeing, safety and education.
It gives detailed breakdowns of each metric alongside a more general description of the area.
Locations are also given overall scores out of ten on safety, affordability, health, education and accessibility.
The helpful tool also provides a property price analysis showing changes in price over time in the area in question.
It was updated recently with new Edinburgh information with the Scot behind the project sharing the tool with followers on social media.
In a post yesterday, they wrote: “Made a free neighbourhood map for Edinburgh – might help locals looking to move.”
Despite the good intentions behind the tool, it garnered a host of sceptical responses from social media users questioning the data used.
One person said: “Nice.
“Some data a bit questionable – I clicked about randomly and West Pilton Crescent said average property price was £37k (tad low!) and it got an affordability score of 2.5 (if £37k isn’t affordable in Edinburgh then what is?).
“Possibly source data pulling in like a sale of a garage or something?”
Another wrote: “If you want this to be genuinely useful you need to be open in your underlying source data and explain what the various scales/colour coding represent.
“The affordability seems out of whack and what data is safety based on?”
A third commented: “Great concept. My area is missing some nursery schools.”
The tool’s creator then issued an update, explaining: “I’m planning to release a patch update next week to iron out some of the kinks.
“Affordability is pulled from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation data, it’s a combination of how many people are employed in the area and how many of them are well off.
“Now that you say it in this context, affordability is probably not the best term to describe that number.
“Will fix that in next week’s patch release together with the price card, nursery location and some other bug fixes/improvements.”
