How walkable is your neighborhood?

Walkability has always been an important criteria for many home buyers. Many people like being able to walk downtown (and stumble home), to the movies, the concerts at Les Schwab Amphitheatre, and coffee shops and restaurants. In Bend, that generally means you have to be close to downtown or the Old Mill District. Many of the buyers I work with can’t afford to live near those areas but still like the idea of being able to walk places. I know there are pockets and hubs throughout Bend that would allow someone living in NE Bend, say, to walk or at least ride their bike to rent a movie or get ice cream but finding those pockets is sometimes tough. Enter “Walk Score”, a website I just discovered that allows a person to enter an address and find out how walkable a particular neighborhood is. I’ve been playing for about 10 minutes and am fairly impressed. What I found most useful was to enter a mock address (you don’t even need the house number) in NE Bend, for example, and see what pops up. Once I found out where the restaurants and shops were, I used the MLS map search feature to draw boundary lines around that particular area to find homes for sale and voila! I’ve located homes for my buyers that are “walkable”. Very cool.  Try it out for yourself:

http://www.walkscore.com/