Ethical Homes

When shopping for a new home, a good map can be invaluable. Here are a few good mapping resources, both online and print.

Different maps serve different purposes, so all of these resources are quite handy:

Trying to figure out where a specific property that you’re interested in is actually located?

Google Maps is my current favorite ad hoc online mapping tool; it’s smart enough to translate “1 Washington Washington DC” into “1 Washington Circle NW, Washington DC”, and return the correct map, unlike other sites that make you enter the street, city, and state in different fields, and then confirm that yes, you meant Washington Circle, and yes, you meant Washington Circle NW.

Trying to find out how to get driving directions to go to a property?

Google Maps is also quite handy here, but it has two big flaws; it only gives relative directions (e.g. “turn right” vs. “turn right, heading southwest”) for turns, which can be a pain when dealing with DC’s turning circles (where every street leaves the circle via right turns in two different directions—knowing to turn right off of Washington Circle onto, say, New Hampshire Avenue heading northeast rather than southwest would be useful), and the lines that it draws on maps to show routes often don’t show up when printed.

Microsoft’s MapBlast website is a good alternative, as is Rand McNally’s site; I actually prefer the MapBlast interface a little, but Microsoft insists sending visitors to a custom URL every time they go to the site (which confuses my web browser into thinking that I’m visiting a new site with each visit, and causes it to ask me if I want it to auto-fill the search form each time I go there, rather than remembering that I told it to never ask me that again for that site), so I end up using the Rand McNally site more often for driving directions, or else fall back on the far-faster-to-use Google Maps and tolerate its few flaws.

Planning a multi-stop trip?

The MapsOnUs.com website has a great feature that no other free site that I have found includes—the ability to enter a series of addresses, and have it figure out the most efficient order in which to visit them. I often use this feature when planning trips with clients to see multiple properties; when you’re planning on swinging by a dozen properties in one afternoon, an efficient trip plan can save you a lot of time.

Unfortunately, MapsOnUs has a very ugly interface, and the actual directions that it provides are miserable; after ordering the stops for a trip, then, I go to Rand McNally’s Road Trip Planner, which lets you get directions for a multi-stop trip (which neither Google nor MapBlast currently support).

Want to see where the local Metrorail stops are in relation to a property?

Of all of the free mapping services that I’ve tried, only Microsoft’s MapBlast website includes information on Metrorail stops in the Metro DC area; the trick is that those stops only show up when the maps are zoomed in to the highest (or sometimes, for reasons I can’t explain, the second-highest) level of magnification. Since it’s hard to get a sense of where the stops are in relation to each other at that level of magnification, I also like to use the StationMasters website, which provides maps covering the areas right around each
Metro stop and identifying where the stops are relative to each other, so that you can identify local streets to use as landmarks when panning around in MapBlast.

Want to find a street, identify a neighborhood, or otherwise just explore an area?

As big a fan of technology as I am, I still find that a good old-fashioned physical map is usually the best for this type of exploration. The best of those maps, in my opinion, are the Thomas Brothers’ Guides, which were recently bought by Rand McNally and thus also are sold as Rand McNally Street Guides; the TB Guides are comprehensive (100+ page) map books covering every street in a particular metro area, along with easy-to-use indices of streets and neighborhoods. (Note: I like the TB Guides enough that I enrolled Ethical Homes as a Rand McNally Affilliate; any purchases made via this link to their online store sends us a 10% commission, and as with all of our merchant affiliate commissions, we fully disclose them, and donate the entire 10% to charity.) For getting a good “big picture” overview of an entire region, I’m also a big fan of the Rand McNally Folded Maps; they’ve got ones for Metro Washington DC, the DC/Baltimore corridor, and Northern Virginia, and they are only $5.