The importance of crime rates in home purchase decisions and how to research crime statistics in the Atlanta Area

 

Crime is one of the top concerns for prospective buyers seeking to purchase a home.  According to a survey conducted by Trulia.com, crime was the second most important factor in choice for prospective home buyers (“’Crisis of Confidence’ – Good News for Qualified Buyers?,” Realty Times, Phoebe Chongchua, October 31, 2008).

Crime is an important issue because it directly affects the perception of safety, ease that business is conducted, comfort-level of walking through neighborhoods, assessment of home values, and need for additional services or community amenities like a neighborhood watch or home security .  

Crime statistics, however, can be difficult information to track down. Only the most technologically savvy of counties, cities, or police departments have crime statistics available on their websites.  Typically these websites are difficult to navigate and do not provide a reference point for order of magnitude, or how bad crime is compared to other areas.  The FBI provides crime statistics up through 2007, but city level data is the finest grain available through the FBI.  To the average home buyer, crime statistics do not become information until compared against other benchmarks to indicate how much better or worse crime propensity is in a particular area relative to previous years or other geographies such as the city or metro area average, state average, or national average.

Good news for prospective home buyers, or residents that like to stay on top of the state of their neighborhoods – there are some excellent resources available on the internet that provide useful and current crime maps, data and analytics.

Two recommended websites providing rich data and information are:

• Crimereports.com, a free service that provides mapping, data, and analytics for more than 700 law enforcement agency jurisdictions. Advantages are cost, the ability to search and map incidents by detailed type of crime, and customizable reporting period.


• Neighborhoodscout.com is a subscription service that provides neighborhood-level statistics on crime, school performance, and price appreciation ($29.99 for a 1-month subscription to $14.99 per month for a six month subscription).  Advantages include benchmarking of neighborhood against city, metro area, state and U.S.; customizable reporting geographies; and and intuitive index scoring (e.g., an index rank of 64 means that the neighborhood is safer than 64% of neighborhoods tracked).  

For more detailed information on each service, please see the following posts:

Crimereports.com:  http://atlanta.homespace.com/2010/02/05/crimereports

Neighborhoodscout.com:  http://atlanta.homespace.com/2010/02/05/neighborhoodscout