Four ways to search for a home by commute time, compared
Isochrone maps, portal filters, and travel-time home search solve overlapping but genuinely different problems. Here is which one to reach for.
“Search by commute” describes at least four different products. They are easy to confuse and they fail at different things, so it is worth being precise about which one you actually need.
Isochrone maps — CommuteTimeMap, TravelTime
These draw the region reachable within a given time of a point: a blob on a map rather than a circle. They are the purest expression of the idea and they are good at it.
What they do not do is show you homes. You get an area, and then you take that area somewhere else to find out what is for sale inside it. For an early relocation question — roughly where should I even be looking — that is often exactly right, and it is the fastest way to discover that your assumptions about a metro were wrong.
Portal commute filters — Zillow
This is the option most people underrate, and any honest comparison has to lead with it. Zillow shipped a commute-time filter in June 2024. You set a destination and a maximum duration, choose car, transit, bike or foot, and it accounts for whether you are asking about rush hour or off-peak. It supports more than one destination, and Zillow explicitly frames it around non-work places too.
It also sits on top of the largest inventory in the country. If your requirement is one or two destinations and a time limit, a portal filter will very likely answer it, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
Where it runs out is depth. A filter is a yes/no gate: a home is either inside your 30 minutes or it is not. It will not tell you that one qualifying home is 12 minutes from everything you care about while another scrapes in at 29 minutes to work and is badly placed for the rest of your week.
Travel-time home search — what this site does
The difference is scoring rather than filtering. Every home on the map is measured against your whole ranked list of places — up to sixteen categories plus specific addresses you add yourself — and gets a Proximity Score out of 100 that reflects how well the location fits the life you described, not just whether it cleared one threshold.
The routes are drawn. You can see the actual path and the minute count to each place, per home, which is what makes the difference between two apparently similar houses legible instead of theoretical.
The trade-off is honest: our inventory is the Phoenix metro, not the country, and our travel times are road-network estimates rather than live traffic. If you want national coverage and a simple time gate, use the portal. If you want to compare two shortlisted homes properly against a life rather than a destination, that is what this is for.
Manual checking — a mapping app and a spreadsheet
Worth naming because it is what most people actually do, and for a shortlist of three homes it is completely reasonable. Put each address into a mapping app at the hour you would really travel, write the numbers in a spreadsheet, and you have a genuine, live-traffic comparison that no tool on this list can match for accuracy.
It stops scaling at about five homes and two destinations. Past that the arithmetic gets tedious and people quietly stop doing it, which is the entire reason the other three categories exist.
Which to use
- Working out roughly where to look in an unfamiliar metro: an isochrone map.
- One or two destinations, a hard time limit, national inventory: a portal filter.
- Comparing shortlisted homes against several places you go regularly: travel-time search with scoring.
- Final due diligence on two or three addresses: check them by hand, at the real hour, in a mapping app.
Most people end up using more than one, and there is nothing wrong with that. The mistake is assuming the first category is the only one that exists.