We’re delighted to announce that leading London estate agent Foxtons has become the first property player to use Mapumental maps on its website. Visitors to Foxtons.co.uk will now see that every property listed includes a travel time map, highlighted in Foxtons’ brand colours.

Foxtons, whose website just won an award for Best Interface Design at the 2011 International Business Awards, were quick to see the value of travel time maps for house-hunters. Thousands of listings now display a simple, beautiful, map showing how long a commute to work or visit to friends will take on public transport – vital pieces of information to consider when looking for a new home.

The property sector is not the only area of business that stands to benefit from Mapumental’s ground-breaking mapping technology. Mapumental is already talking to major players in the travel industry and recruitment sectors.  Virtually any business that needs to show users how much time it takes to travel to or from a given spot will find these maps very valuable.

One of Mapumental’s core strengths is its  flexibility when it comes to volume – it can provide anything from a single map at a great price to tens of thousands at a significant volume discount.

The service utilises travel-time mapping technology developed by mySociety, drawing journey data from the NPTDR dataset. The same data also drives mySociety’s newest project FixMyTransport.com, which launched just last week, and covers all modes of public transport within GB.

For the maps service, our algorithm calculates journey times from any given point (postcode or latitude and longitude) to every other point in Great Britain. These journey times are displayed as a heatmap, on a background from OpenStreetMap.

Foxtons has made use of the new Mapumental API which enables clients to define the maps’ appearance precisely according to their company preferences. Parameters for choice include:

• maximum travel time
• number of time bands to show
• colour scheme
• the direction of travel (to or from the chosen location)
• target arrival or departure time
• other information (such as title and legend) that goes on the map.

The image is then automatically created and can be published on a website and/or included in printed materials. Website owners can publish the maps themselves, or we can create bespoke integration solutions for them..

To find out more about how Mapumental might work for you, please drop us a line.

Here are some samples of our maps:

Travel times from a residential development in Sevenoaks, departing at 7am

Travel times from St Pancras Reneissance Hotel, departing at 8am

Travel times to reach Cardiff University by 10am