Where To Live?

Imagine you have been handed an exceptional opportunity and have to relocate to Boston within a month. How would you proceed? How would you find the ideal town to live in? Assuming you are not going to live in the middle of the city and would try to find something more affordable.

You don’t want to live somewhere with high crime rates right? If you have a family, good schools are something you’ll be looking at. How about your commute to and from work? You might want to think about the traffic and public transport. All these are things on your mind, so how would you proceed?

Boston is the smallest of the US large cities but has 7 counties in a greater Boston area. The city, Cambridge, North Shore, South Shore, Western Suburbs, etc. Where to live? Let’s take a look at how would one proceed if you are not a player for New England Patriots (also a tough choice, so many rich towns in MA).

1. Asking a friend or a colleague. Good choice, but you friend or your colleague might not have the same life preferences as you do. Well, not going to fail this one, but you have to have a friend and/or colleague in the new town.

2. Real Estate sites! Great idea, but fails. They want you to give them the city name or zip code, which you don’t have.

3. Realtor! Remember me mentioning North Shore, South Shore, etc? How are you going to find a realtor who knows the whole area? Impossible! Time-consuming! Fails.

I’ve surveyed people who recently moved and they have confirmed that not knowing where to live is a big headache.

Almost everyone I interviewed said that they’ll pay for a solution. This could have been biased in my opinion since you developed a mini relationship with people you interview. So either they like you and will pay for your solution, or they don’t like you and will tell you anything to stop bothering them.

Well, I was not satisfied with the fact that people will unilaterally pay for a solution which helps them to narrow down the towns in a large metropolitan area. This is considering most of the real-estate sites are free. I decided to run a survey and the results astonished me… 50% of randomly chosen responders said they will pay for a solution.

As part of the survey, I asked people what are the determinants for them when choosing a town to live in? Low crime and cost of living dominated people’s preferences. The top 6 criteria’s survey produced:

1. Low Crime
2. Cost Of Living
3. Good Schools
4. Public Transport
5. Distance From the City
6. Distance From the Church

The solution should resolve around the above-mentioned criteria. The solution is complex, but social impact is worth the complexity. Stay tuned…

Some fun references