Moving- Safe Neighborhoods in Miami

- Safe and neighborhood are probably in almost every text, email or phone call that I receive when someone's looking to move here or relocate to the South Florid area. Of course, everybody wants to live in a safe area, but that word, safe, has a different definition for everybody. Today on "Talk with Traci," hopefully I'm gonna be able to give you a few tools that are gonna help you determine, which areas are the safest for you and your family, so stay tuned. Hi, I'm Traci Tam, a Florida real estate broker. And for everything about life and living in the South Florida area and all things real estate, make sure you subscribe to my channel and tap that bell so you don't miss any of our weekly videos. Are you thinking about moving to the South Florida area and wondering which neighborhoods would be safest for you and your family? Well realtors like myself try to shy away from that word safe. Realtors, we adhere to a strict code of ethics and the Fair Housing Act, and we can't steer you into certain neighborhoods based on what we deem as safe. All we can do is we can provide you with the right tools to let you determine what you think is a safe neighborhood. So once again we're gonna put that information back on you, but I'm gonna give you some of the tools that I use and some of my customers have used in the past that have seemed to work out to help them determine what the best neighborhood for them is in South Florida. I've helped hundreds of families through this process, and they all seem to be happy after they just do a little bit of due diligence on their part. Thank goodness we live in a technologically advanced world because first, we're going to start online. I recommend everybody first start with relator.com. Pops up, right here you're gonna type in either the city or if you have a particular address that you wanna search, type that in that white search bar. And then you're gonna click search. And then a bunch of houses is gonna pop up. You can click on any house and it's gonna show you the crime rate in that neighborhood. But because I'm looking at a particular city, Palmetto Bay, for this search example, I'm gonna actually try to find an address that has Palmetto Bay in it. So here we go. So this one has the city Palmetto Bay, Florida, which is what I'm searching for so I'm gonna double click on that. And then right here when that pops up you're gonna see a little map right here. And it might look a little bit different, depending on what version of Google Chrome or Safari or Internet Explorer that you're using, but somewhere on that page you're gonna see a map. Double click on that map. Okay, so we just wanna one click on it, not double click. And we're gonna zoom out on the map. And you can see that there are different colors of shading. And as the chart right here shows us, the lower, the less, lighter the color, the less crime is in that particular area. So the red dot represents the area that we're actually searching. And the darker the shading, the more crime. And we're not gonna rely too much just on this data 'cause we're gonna use a lot of different sites and we're gonna get a big picture of the neighborhood in general that we're actually researching because a lot of these cities and towns and villages don't have to report to every single sight, and a lot of them don't. So realtor.com might be pulling from a couple of sites that might not have all of the data say for the village of Pinecrest or Palmetto Bay or the different municipalities or different cities. So that's why I say to get a big picture of the area and use multiple sites, which we're gonna go over in this video because of a lot of these dark shaded areas, they have very high-end houses that are very, very popular in our area. And I was born and raised in South Florida, and I was actually born and raised and lived in Miami my entire life, and I'm very familiar with this area. And a lot of these dark shaded areas are very, very popular, and as I said, have very high-end homes in them. So take this one map with a grain of salt. And every map that you're gonna use and every site that you're gonna use, just take the data and put it all together to get a big picture of what that exact neighborhood is and whether or not it's gonna fit your lifestyle and your family's lifestyle and what you define as safe. So right here we're gonna go to miamidade.gov. And it's gonna, it's actually the miamidade.gov and it's the crime map part of their website. So then we're gonna go here and it's gonna be, it's gonna say crime incident map. We're gonna click on that. And it's gonna ask us to leave this sight 'cause it's actually gonna take us into the crimemapping.com site which is one of my favorite sites. But once again it doesn't get data from all the cities and all the municipalities and all of the villages. So this is just one more site that's gonna contribute to the big picture of the neighborhood that you would like to live in. So at first, this looks like a big boggle of mess. And what you have to do is you can type in right here an address, landmark or zip code. So once again, if you know a particular address you can type that in, but for this example let's type in Palmetto. Florida, right here. We're gonna click on it and then we're gonna click on go. We're gonna click out that and let's see, right here we're gonna scroll out on this. So right here it has the mark with the red dot, and that's gonna show you the vicinity of Palmetto Bay. And then it's gonna bring up a bunch of different little pictures throughout the map. And what you can do is you can click here and go to facts. And then right here where it says what type of crimes are displayed. It's gonna show you what the different little symbols mean. So this I saw a lot of so let's go back to the map. So right here it's a little fist, and that means that there was an assault reported. So once again, as I said, this is only one tool, and although there's no crime reported here and no crimes reported here, didn't necessarily mean that there weren't' any crimes reported, it just means that, ooh there's some that popped up. So just because there's no crimes here or no crimes here. And obviously you can see that there are houses. It doesn't mean that there were no crimes actually reported there. And there are so many that are reported here, but what it does mean is that maybe this village of Pinecrest didn't report to crime mapping statics. So it's not actually showing up on the site. So that's another site that we like to use. Predator and offender map. So I always say to check that site too. It's the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. I'm also gonna leave these links below in the description so they'll be easy for you to click on and do your own search. Let's go again with Palmetto Bay. We're gonna do, let's say a two-mile radius. We're gonna click on search. And we got, I don't know what that is. So sometimes it says no results found for that search, but then you can see how it has a little icon that you can click on. So click on that. Palmetto Bay little icon. And it's actually gonna take us to the site and show us. So as you can see this person lives in Palmetto Bay, Palmetto Bay. And it's gonna go through, so there's one of nine. So we have one total page. And it's gonna show you their address. And if you wanna click on the map it'll show you the map. And he actually lives right by a park, which I did not think was legal. But anyways you can filter out different things and look at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement sexual offender maps and see where the registered sexual offenders are in your particular neighborhood or proximity to the house that you're searching. All in all these maps and all of these sites, and all this technology is a good place to start. But what I really recommend is save the money if you're a flight away, and fly down here and stay for a couple of days. And visit those sites during the day, at night, on a weekend. And if you have a little bit of time, stop by the local parks if you have children and talk with the other moms or the other dads that are in the park playing. And ask them what they like about their neighborhood or what they don't like about their neighborhood. Maybe make an appointment with the administrators at a local school that you're thinking about having your children attend. And see, walk through the hallways and see what you think of the school when school's in session. Do your due diligence and look around. Go to the local shops, the local restaurants. Get a feel of how you would fit into that particular neighborhood because I truly feel like that's the best way to get a feeling of that community and that neighborhood. Now I have a few tools that are gonna help you get started identifying that neighborhood. I'm also gonna leave those links for those different sites below in the description. So don't worry and don't fret if I spoke too fast and you didn't write down the websites because the links will be below in the description. But now that you're narrowing in on a neighborhood, what do you do next? Well, I'll tell you, call me so we can set up an appointment either in person or to schedule a Zoom conference call. Remember to go to those social media sites and try to find community pages on different neighborhoods that you're thinking about moving into, and ask those people that are living in those neighborhoods what they like about that particular neighborhood and what they don't like so much about it. People love to talk about where they live. Whether good or bad, they're gonna pretty much be honest with you and you're gonna get a good feel of what the community feels about where they live. Also, remember that there are so many factors that go into a neighborhood that you want to live in. And I'm sure that safety is probably right there at the top of the list. But also remember that no area is crime-free. Everyone has a different definition of what feels safe to them, so hopefully, these tools will help you in determining that and make the process a little bit smoother. And if you are thinking about buying, I have a great guide for buyers, and I'm gonna put that link in the description below. And if you find this video helpful, make sure that you share it with your friends. And if you haven't subscribed to the channel, please subscribe to my channel and like this video, and we'll see you next week on "Talk With Traci."