Using Trulia's Crime Map

[Aaron Jones]

I've been looking at properties posted on the MLS in areas I'm not very familiar with. I found the crime map on Trulia, and thought it might be a useful tool in analyzing a particular area. Does anybody else use this tool? Have you found it to be an accurate indicator of whether an area is sketchy or not?

[Peter MacKercher]

Trulia's crime map is useful, and some localities have newspapers that also have some sort of interactive crime log/map. Police departments may also have something similar; St. Louis's PD will point you towards https://www.crimereports.com/ for crime mapping. Trulia appears to hybridize that website and https://spotcrime.com to create their heat maps.

This came up in the office today, and one of my agents said he was talking to a friend of his who's an officer. The heat maps aren't always accurate, which you can expect, as some areas have many crimes that aren't reported, and other areas may have more crimes that are reported and therefore look worse on the mapping tools you'll see online. That's something to keep in mind, too, when you're looking at these sources.