About SF Pipeline
SF Pipeline is an interactive map displaying real estate developments in San Francisco. It is in prototype form and will eventually be improved to include more complete and up-to-date information, additional filtering options, marker clustering for greater speed, email alerts, RSS feeds and a blog.
Anyone can add or edit a development project, or link a news article or document to a project, subject to approval by a site editor.
The map is in pre-beta stage and has not officially launched. Its initial beta launch is planned for November 2007.
The map can be filtered by type of development (residential, office, hotel, etc.), by stage (proposed, approved, under construction, etc.) and by various dates associated with the development. (Even more filters are coming soon!)
Each development project also carries information about size, height, associated companies and links to relevant articles and documents.
The map is built using the Google Maps API. This means the mapping software is provided by Google -- the site is not affiliated with or run by Google.
Editor - Ryan Tate
The creator and editor of the site is Ryan Tate, a journalist and programmer who works in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California.
I write frequently about real estate, including commercial and residential real estate in the East Bay and hotel real estate in San Francisco.
Scope
The SF Pipeline map focuses on active real estate developments in the city of San Francisco. "Active" means it is in the "pipeline," meaning that the project is under consideration or construction and has not been completed, canceled or demolished.
Once a project has been completed, it remains in the database and may be made available on the map in the future.
Also, I plan to launch a similar map for Oakland, at oaklandpipeline.com, and eventually for other parts of the East Bay and the Peninsula.
Sources
Information for the map comes from published articles in the San Francisco Business Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and periodicals and Web sites of all sorts. Information is also drawn from government sources, for example Planning Commission agendas and so forth.
Whenever possible, the source of information about a project will be indicated with an associated article link or in the "Other details" field of the project record.
Complaints, feature requests and other feedback
Please email any complaints, feature requests or other feedback to me at ryantate@ryantate.com. I'm curious to hear if this map is helpful to anyone else! I'm also eager for feedback of any sort, including bug reports, complaints, feature requests, etc. Feel free to email me!
Roadmap
Further work on SF Pipeline will be heavily influenced by user feature requests and other feedback. But you can read preliminary plans for how it will evolve at the following link:
API - not yet!
Within the next several months, I plan to implement an API, or Application Programming Interface, that will allow other software to programmatically extract, contribute and search information in the database that drives SF Pipeline.
The API will most likely be based on XML-RPC, a simple specification for querying, manipulating and exchanging information over the Web.
It is important that people are able to get information out of SF Pipeline and incorporate it into other applications, especially since I want them to contribute information in to SF Pipeline! An open API will hopefully help people feel even more comfortable contributing information to this site, and maybe even feed new sites that can make clever use of the information collected here.
Raw data
Though the API for adding and searching information is not yet available, anyone can download an XML document containing information about all projects that appear on the map at the following link:
XML for all mapped SF Pipeline projects
If you make use of this data on another Web site, I request that you likewise share the data stream from your own site, if any, in an explicit and prominent fashion. I also humbly ask that you somehow credit sfpipeline.com for whatever significant amount of data you use.