Contents
A New Era for Home Search
Realtor.com is one of the largest and most trusted property portals in the US. Launched in 1995, it now helps over 100 million people every month find their next home.
At its core, Realtor.com’s mission is to make the home journey smarter, simpler, and more efficient. But in today’s world, that means more than just showing a list of properties, it means showing how a home fits into your life.
Because for most people, finding a home isn’t just about the number of bedrooms and square footage. It’s about how long it takes to get to work, to drop the kids off at school, and to reach the places that mean the most to them.
Property hunters are asking:
- How long will my commute take?
- How much will it cost for me to get into the city?
- Will I be able to walk to green spaces easily?
- Can I walk the kids to school?
To bring real-world travel insights to every property search, Realtor.com partnered with TravelTime.
How Realtor.com Uses TravelTime
Realtor.com powers multiple time-based search, display, filter and ranking features using TravelTime.
Commute time search
Realtor users begin by specifying their commute preferences in the search portal.
- Choose a location to start their search e.g. workplace, school, or favourite part of town
- Select an acceptable commute time to reach that location e.g. 30 minutes
- Choose their desired modes of transport e.g. driving, public transport, walking or cycling
These location and travel preferences become the foundation for all downstream filtering and display.
Time-based filtering and isochrone map view
Realtor.com filters all relevant listings, displays those that meet the search preferences. It returns all 3-bed properties within a 45-minute journey on public transport from the user’s workplace in Manhattan, for example.
Realtor displays this as both a list of properties and shows an isochrone — a map boundary showing all areas reachable within the user’s chosen time threshold and transport mode.
This allows users see live spatial constraints on where they can realistically live, not just a radius by distance, but by time.
Commute settings from the property display page
On any property detail page, users can adjust or reset their commute preferences directly or add a commute if they haven’t already.
TravelTime runs the calculation instantly, showing travel times from that property to their chosen destinations.
Calculating fuel costs
Beyond just travel times, TravelTime delivers the data that supports Realtor’s fuel calculation costs.
By combining distance, mode, and time, users see a richer picture: not just how long, but how much it will cost too.
Population of commute times on every page
Once a user sets their commute preferences, Realtor automatically populates commute estimates on every property they view.
No more manual entry for every listing. The experience is seamless and personalised.
Why Realtor.com Chose TravelTime
Realtor’s commute features are only made possible because TravelTime meets demands across the board.
TravelTime’s API performance and scalability, accurate commute calculations, unique licensing model, world-class support and documentation, allow our customers to build without compromise.
High-performance at scale
Realtor.com serves millions of users across the US, handling huge volumes of property searches and commute queries per session.
TravelTime API is engineered for high concurrency and large-scale property portals, enabling instant responses even under heavy load. Our architecture ensures that each Realtor request is processed instantly, and commute times are delivered in milliseconds, to deliver a seamless on-page UX.
Accurate journey time calculations
TravelTime models real-world transit networks including scheduled public transport, real walking and cycling paths, driving routes, and transfer times.
We allow for complex requests using advanced parameters, accounting for time-of-day variations, connection wait times, and more, to reflect how people actually travel.
This quality of data and routing logic ensure that the commute times shown on the Realtor property portal are trustworthy and credible, making it a go-to for millions of users.
Non-transactional pricing model
Realtor benefits from TravelTime’s non-transactional licensing model: a fixed annual license that enables unlimited API usage, rather than per-request billing. This gives Realtor.com the freedom to expand features, serve heavy traffic, and manage usage spikes without cost surprises.
Alternative location APIs, including Google, HERE, TomTom, and Mapbox, use pay-as-you-go models to scale cost linearly with queries.
This transaction-based approach to B2B pricing can work for companies that don’t need lots of travel times, but it creates huge financial risk for large-scale portals like Realtor.
TravelTime support and partnership
TravelTime has been built from the ground-up. Our support team consists of engineers that built and continuously optimise the API.
Alongside our best-in-class documentation, TravelTime support enables Realtor to continuously roll out commute features with confidence.
Benchmark our API accuracy and performance against Google, Mapbox, HERE, and TomTom to see for yourself. Get started in Github.
Reimagining Property Search with Time
With TravelTime powering commute logic behind the scenes, Realtor has transformed the property discovery experience. Now, users can search by where they want to go, how fast they need to get there, and see how much it will cost.
It goes far beyond a simple location and distance radius search, to seeing how a property actually fits into their lives, using a trusted time-based approach with TravelTime.
Leading property portals like Realtor, Rightmove, Zoopla, CoStar, and Jitty continue to partner with TravelTime. We are the number one choice for commute time calculations.
Discover how TravelTime can transform your property portal. Get started.