Mapumental
Mapumental is a cool new service brought to you by the brainboxes at mySociety with some help from 4ip. Basically it allows you to see exactly where in the country you can afford to live (based on “average” house prices) and still commute to a given place of work.
Unfortunately you need an invite to get access to the interactive site, so you’ll have to make do with the teaser video for now. However, I can confirm that the system is one of the coolest and potentially most useful sites I’ve seen in ages. Hopefully there will be some improvements to come, some of the things I’d like to see include:
- Ability to set a start time which isn’t 9:00am, for those of us who have to be in work earlier, work shifts or are students with lectures at varying times each day.
- Rent data as well as house prices, as the latter doesn’t help much if you can’t afford to buy or the banks won’t give you the credit you need. Not entirely sure how this would work as house prices are kept at the Land Registry but there is no equivalent for rents.