New Real Estate App Lets Users See Their Future Neighbors’ Political Affiliation Before Moving In | The new company gives potential homebuyers demographic information on their neighborhood.
https://gizmodo.com/new-real-estate-app-lets-users-see-their-future-neighbors-political-affiliation-before-moving-in-2000540086
14 Comments
From the article: As if the U.S. weren’t polarized enough, a new real estate app promises Americans the opportunity to retreat even further into politically siloed communities by screening their potential neighbors for unwanted party affiliations. The Oyssey app, which bills itself as a “real estate search management platform,” includes a feature that allows would-be homebuyers to assess the political leanings of their potential neighbors before moving in.
“Beyond standard search filters, Oyssey pioneers never before available block-by-block social and political data,” the app’s website reads. The platform sources that information from “election results and campaign contributions, along with housing trends and other social data,” the New York Post writes.
“It’s about getting buyers homes that they love,” Oyssey’s CEO, Huw Nierenberg told Axios, which wrote about the app’s unique feature. Nierenberg has also said he’s on a mission to “democratize home search data.”
Oyssey, which is a fairly new company and only recently soft launched in South Florida and New York City this October, also provides users with a host of other local demographic data, including information on the age, education, and income of potential neighbors.
One of the more intriguing data points Oyssey offers is the ability to tell how many dogs live in your neighborhood. If you live in a place like New York City, this is genuinely useful information. Either A) you like dogs, and you want to know where you can see as many as possible, or B), you dislike having to sidestep dog crap whenever you leave your apartment and would like to know where they are least likely to reside. Overall, a good feature.
When it comes to the political screening element of Oyssey’s offerings, there is obviously more to be worried about. On the one hand, you can see why homebuyers would want this kind of information. Who doesn’t want to know who their neighbors are? On the other hand, it might not be such a great idea to incentivize people to only live with people who are already like them. Plus, in a place like New York City, I don’t think you’re going to be getting a whole lot of political variety, anyway.
I see the good and bad in this. On one hand it drives the wedge even deeper, on the other hand you want to live in a community that shares your same values.
I happen to live in a community that is polar opposite of what I value and believe. It is more than an inconvenience is many ways. One cannot simply disagree with certain people these days because violence and hate are on the menu. Houses have been targeted for something as simple as a yard sign, sometimes leading to ongoing harassment. Until we acknowledge realty and go back to valuing facts over opinions, apps like this will serve an important purpose.
Absolutely nothing bad will come of this. Nope.
… /s
You can already do this for free, by doner, zip code, who the doner is employed by, or who was donated to. You can even mix and match filters, and export to Excel and make a pivot table with no effort whatsoever.
The real story here is that most people don’t know how easy it is to find their political donations, or that the same freely available public data includes their exact street address and employer in the exported file.
Or maybe it’s that a real estate company has discovered how to monetize a [freely available service](https://www.fec.gov/data/receipts/individual-contributions/).
Divide and conquer. Sure it’s a good idea to keep the echo chambers echoing without keeping each other in check.
Wonder how long that will last. Realtor removed crime statistics from their layers
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Unpopular opinion:
People of color and marginalized groups who have real reason to fear violence from their neighbors will find this helpful.
If I’m a Spanish speaker I may not want to live next to maga people who don’t care if I’m a legal citizen.
Just what we need — another way to put up fences between us.
It’s illegal if a realtor were to do it, it’s called steering. This only promotes segregation and it’s 100% bullshit.
Why round up your political enemies when they can round themselves up? This is the self-checkout version of rounding people up
According to a CBS report “The typical homebuyer today is older than ever, as well as wealthier, new data shows.” So in the short term who does this serve and what do they do with this data? Seems like a bad idea which leads to self-segregation. However there’s plenty of better data with which do that otherwise.
Self segregation will also make gerrymandering simpler.
More partisanship for the future and we embrace it.
I once bought property in Northern Ireland. You don’t need an app, they literally paint the kerbstones. I ended up buying in the middle of nowhere. Fuck getting involved in that shit, if you think recent American politics is toxic then you’re not wrong. It can always be worse.
As if social media bubbles weren‘t bad enough, they’ll now create IRL bubbles as well.