Neighborhood Walk Score Overlay

WHAT IT DOES

Neighborhood Walk Score Overlay scans real estate listing pages for property addresses and displays a floating overlay showing Walk Score, Transit Score, and Bike Score for the property's neighborhood. A small color-coded badge appears next to the property address with the Walk Score number—green for very walkable (70+), yellow for somewhat walkable (50-69), and red for car-dependent (below 50). Clicking the badge opens a detailed breakdown panel showing nearby amenities including restaurants, grocery stores, parks, schools, shopping, and cafes within walking distance. The panel also displays the Transit Score and Bike Score when available. This helps homebuyers and renters quickly assess a property's walkability without leaving the listing page.

WHERE IT RUNS

This script operates as a userscript within the BotGentz extension on any webpage containing real estate listings, including Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, Trulia, and other property sites. It functions on any modern browser that supports the BotGentz extension, including Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera. The script runs entirely client-side, fetching Walk Score data via the Walk Score API with caching to reduce API usage and improve performance.

HOW TO USE

After installation, the script automatically scans the page for property addresses. When an address is found, a badge appears next to it showing the Walk Score. Click the badge to open a detailed panel with the full score breakdown and nearby amenities. To use the Walk Score API, you must obtain a free API key from walkscore.com and enter it in the settings panel. The script caches results locally to minimize API calls and improve load times. Use the panel to toggle the badge display, adjust badge position, enable auto-fetching, control caching, or change the overlay position. Click "Clear Cache" to force fresh API requests.

THE MECHANISM THAT MAKES IT WORK

The script detects addresses using a combination of DOM selectors and regex pattern matching. It scans for common real estate address elements like [itemprop="address"], .address, and .property-address, falling back to a regex-based heuristic that detects address-like patterns (e.g., "123 Main St, City, State"). Once an address is detected, the script constructs a request to the Walk Score API with the address and the user's API key. The API returns walkability scores, transit scores, and bike scores in JSON format. Results are cached using GM_setValue with a configurable duration (default 7 days) to reduce API calls. The badge and panel use dynamic DOM insertion to avoid disrupting the page layout, with color coding derived from the Walk Score value using a threshold system (70+, 50-69, below 50).

THE PANEL

The script panel is built using BotGentz's BGPanel framework and provides comprehensive control over the Walk Score overlay's behavior. The panel opens as a floating overlay that can be dragged anywhere on your screen, with a clean dark theme matching the tool's aesthetic. It includes a password input field for the Walk Score API key, toggle switches for enabling the overlay, showing the score badge, auto-fetching on page load, and caching results, and dropdown menus for badge position (left or right of address) and overlay position (top-left, top-right, bottom-left, or bottom-right). Action buttons allow you to save settings, clear the cache, or reset all settings to defaults. The panel collapses to a small icon when not in use and expands when clicked, remaining accessible but unobtrusive. Press the Escape key at any time to close the panel.

PLEASE NOTE

This script requires the free BotGentz extension to be installed and activated in your browser. The extension is available from the official BotGentz website. You must obtain a free Walk Score API key from walkscore.com to use this script—the free tier allows up to 1,000 requests per day, which is sufficient for most users. The script caches results to minimize API usage; you can clear the cache at any time via the panel. The Walk Score API may occasionally return errors or time out; the script handles these gracefully with fallback messages. The nearby amenities data shown in the panel is based on the Walk Score API response and may not be available for all locations. All data is processed locally and not shared with any third-party services. If a site's address structure changes significantly, the address detection may need updates to maintain compatibility.