SkaldMaps FAQ

SkaldMaps is designed for home buyers, real estate investors, realtors, and anyone who wants a practical way to understand U.S. places through data.

We offer a large dataset of attributes across ZIPs, counties, and census tracts, with tract workflows on Expert.

Whether you're a first-time buyer trying to balance commute and school quality, an investor looking for locations with strong public-data fundamentals, or just a curious researcher, SkaldMaps gives you the data and tools to make informed decisions.

You can work with affordability, ownership costs, rent benchmarks, amenities, commute patterns, weather, school data, home price trends, and more.

We combine large sets of public and private datasets and enrich them with geospatial calculations so the same map, filter, compare, and rating workflow can work across ZIPs, counties, and tracts where supported.

The attribute reference lists the current fields, descriptions, formats, and scoring support: browse the data dictionary.

We try to get source data updates as they get released and re-calculate our own models every time one of the source datasets changes.

For datasets like weather data, parsed amenities, geocoded locations, and calculated distances, this can happen weekly.

Larger scale updates, such as new congressional maps or census results are only released sporadically.

For the Data Engineers out there, we run a large metadata catalog that tracks these refresh intervals automatically.

Instead of using a generic market score, you define the criteria, weight them, and filter the results according to your own strategy.

This allows you to find exactly what you're looking for, whether that's areas with favorable rent benchmarks and home price trends, affordable ownership costs and good schools, or a low-density rural area for a hunting property.

SkaldMaps supports ZIP codes, tracts, and counties, but ZIP codes are our default presentation layer.

ZIP codes are where a lot of real estate decisions actually happen. They're the level at which homes are listed, schools are assigned, and local amenities cluster.

If you’re a GIS geek, you probably know some of their limitations: ZIP codes can cross county and municipal boundaries, change over time, and were originally designed for mail delivery rather than statistical analysis - so we're actually using ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs).

Still, they divide most populated parts of the United States into highly detailed yet manageable geographic units - small enough to capture meaningful local variation, but large enough to keep data practical and actionable for many real-world use cases. County-level analysis, by comparison, is often too coarse and inconsistent, especially between dense urban regions and large rural counties.

They are also pragmatically consistent nationwide: whether a state uses counties, parishes, boroughs, or other local divisions, the USPS framework provides a common geographic reference familiar to consumers and businesses alike.

It also allows us to do advanced geospatial calculations, like calculating access to amenities and commute patterns based on actual road networks, at a practical nationwide scale.

That said, ZIPs are not the only useful geography. SkaldMaps now supports county views where supported and census tract workflows on Expert.

We do not offer parcel data - our focus is on area-level data and tools across ZIPs, counties, and tracts. This allows us to provide a more affordable and user-friendly product for home buyers, investors, and realtors who want to explore and understand markets before considering individual parcel research.

In other words, if you want to filter an entire state by price, schools, commute (or whatever you care about!) to find promising ZIP codes for a home search or investment thesis, SkaldMaps is built for that.

We wanted to build a tool that's useful for a homebuyer moving for work, somebody looking for an investment property, or a realtor or investor helping clients - not just for giant corporations investing millions in commercial real estate.

Nothing wrong with that: We think SkaldMaps still offers some great tools for those folks. However, if you need property lines, the good people over at those companies do great work and offer powerful tools for users who need parcel-level data and analysis.

We see SkaldMaps as complementary to those offerings - a more accessible entry point for many users, and a way to explore and understand county, ZIP, or even census tract level patterns that can inform more detailed analysis down the line.

SkaldMaps LLC is a small business from Georgia. Our background is in Data Engineering and Data Science, and we're passionate about making data more accessible and actionable for everyone.

Our starter plan is well within reach for regular home owners, no MLS access required.

SkaldMaps was born out of a prototype we've built for ourselves - and wound up purchasing a property based on the data it uncovered.

SkaldMaps is the grown up version of that idea - with lots more RAM needed to build our models.

If you want to talk to a human, send us a note and we'll get back to you.

Skáld is Old Norse for "poet". Skaldic verses are one of our main sources of knowledge about what we commonly refer to as "Vikings".

While "Viking" was actually a job, not a people, the Norse theme is a nod to the Norse voyages to Vinland - one of the earliest known European explorations of North America. We like the idea of a name that evokes exploration, discovery, and making sense of new lands.

It was also likely Skalds who wrote the original sagas - their names, however, are sadly lost to history.

Our logo is inspired by the Jēran rune, which broadly stands for harvest, cycles, and the fruits of labor. We liked the idea of a symbol that represents the payoff of doing the work to understand the data and make informed decisions.

As you may guess, we spend too much time on this, but I hope it gives you an idea of the spirit we want to bring to SkaldMaps.