Thread: Database showing apt facing direction?

The internet is good for some things but this is not one of them. Don't ever count on any application to show you where a property is, which direction it faces or what it looks like.

Pictures and virtual tours are all deceiving. You could possibly miss out on the best ones unless you personally visit the units.

Originally Posted by gerard

Is there a database available online somewhere, where one can find out which apartment is facing which direction, for a given building? e.g. Apt. 123 facing North, etc.?

Gerard:

You can create your own solutions instead of waiting for something to happen on the Internet. I was searching for something similar about a year ago. Here's what I found: No database online that I know of, but there are paid databases that may contain the information you seek. I've actually had out of town customers ask me if the sun rose facing the front of the house (house had a lot of windows) and I couldn't tell them without a personal visit to the home. So, out of curiosity, I called my local tax office and asked them what they had in their databases.

Turns out, there was a tremendous amount of data to be had. I'm doing all sorts of neat things with that data, but what relates to your question are the geocoordinates. The tax data has the geocoordinates (degrees, minutes, seconds) of the center of all the parcels in the county. Instead of using Google's addresses, which are never spot on and are about 4 houses off, I import my own accurate coordinates from the tax records to a SQL server I manage. I then plot the accurate coordinates on the googlemap, and so now you can see exactly which way the homes are facing because the pins are dead center of the correct homes as you can view them on the satellite maps.

I've never purchased the tax data for anything other than single family residential, but it would be worth a call to your tax office just to see (if you want it that bad). Who knows, they may surprise you. I try to offer things on my real estate site that no one else on earth has. After a year of hard work, I've done just that.

Regards.