How drive-time home search works

Where the minutes come from, how the score is built, and the situations in which both are wrong. If you are going to make a six-figure decision partly on these numbers, you should know what they are.

Travel modes

Every place you add carries its own mode — drive, bike or walk — and its own time budget. That matters more than it sounds: a fifteen-minute walk and a fifteen-minute drive describe completely different relationships to a place, and collapsing them into one number is how a “walkable” score ends up meaning nothing.

How the minutes are calculated

Two things are happening. The map first estimates a time for every home from road-network distance, which is what makes it possible to score thousands of listings at once. Then, for the home you select, it fetches the real route and snaps the line to actual roads — which is the coloured path and the minute label you see per place.

So the number you see while scanning is an estimate, and the number you see on a selected home is a routed one. They are usually close. Where they diverge, the routed figure is the one to trust.

How the Proximity Score is built

For each place you care about, the score compares its travel time to the budget you set for it. Reaching it in half your budget or less earns full credit; taking more than double earns none; anything between falls on a straight line. Every place contributes equally, and the average becomes the 0–100 score on the map pin.

Two consequences worth knowing. Because places are weighted equally, adding a destination you rarely visit dilutes the score — keep the list to what you actually do. And because the curve is linear between the bounds, the score is most informative in the middle: a 90 and a 95 are near-identical in practice, while a 40 and a 70 are genuinely different homes.

Where the model is wrong

No live traffic. Estimates describe a typical journey, not a departure at 7:45 on a Tuesday. Peak and off-peak on the same corridor can differ substantially, and the direction of travel matters.
No time-of-day modelling. The morning inbound direction is often far worse than the outbound one; the score does not know which way you go.
Category places are the closest match, not your favourite. If you ask for “grocery”, the time shown is to the nearest one, which may not be the one you would actually choose to use.
Coverage is the Phoenix metro. Listings come from a licensed feed and refresh on a schedule, so a very new listing may not be on the map yet.

How to use it without being misled

Treat a five-minute gap between two homes as noise and a fifteen-minute gap as real. Use the score to build a shortlist rather than to pick a winner. Then drive the routes that matter, at the hour you will actually drive them, before you commit to anything — no model replaces that, and this one does not claim to.

Homes for sale by commute time — the search itself.
What a Proximity Score means — the shorter version of the scoring section above.
Four ways to search by commute, compared

Last reviewed 26 August 2026.