Search property by what's nearby: schools, metro, parks

Nobody moves house because of a price band. People move to be closer to a school, a tram stop, a park, or a pharmacy that is open on Sunday. Yet the filter panel on most property sites asks about price, size and room count, and then leaves you to work out the rest from a map pin and a guess.

Why do price and size filters miss what you actually care about?

Because they describe the property, and almost nothing about daily life happens inside the property.

A 70 m² two-bedroom for €1,200 a month tells you nothing about the twenty-minute walk to the nearest tram, the fact that the closest supermarket shut last year, or that the primary school you were counting on is on the wrong side of a four-lane road. Those are the things that decide whether you renew the lease or start looking again in eleven months, and they are exactly the things a price slider cannot express.

The usual workaround is to search by district, then check each candidate by hand: open a map in another tab, drop a pin, measure. It works, and it collapses the moment you have more than a handful of listings, or the moment you are looking at a city whose districts you do not know yet. Someone moving to Prague, Vienna or Amsterdam for the first time has no idea which postcode means "ten minutes from a metro" and which means "two buses and a change".

Location is a property of the address, not of the neighbourhood name. So it belongs in the filter panel.

How does searching by what's nearby actually work?

Every published listing already carries the distance to the nearest place of each type, worked out in advance: the nearest school, the nearest tram stop, the nearest pharmacy, and so on for every category in the list. When you tick School and Metro in the Nearby amenities filter, nothing is measured at that moment. The search looks up which listings already have both within the radius and returns those.

Three details are worth knowing, because they change how you should use it.

The radius is 500 metres. That is the number the site searches with, straight-line from the property to the place, which is roughly six minutes at a normal walking pace. Straight-line distance is not the same as a walking route, so a listing 500 metres from a station across a river or a rail cutting will still qualify. Treat the result as "worth walking to" rather than a routed journey time, and check the map for the last hundred metres.

Ticking more than one narrows the list, it does not widen it. Select school, park and supermarket and you get the listings that have all three in range. This is the opposite of how most amenity filters behave and it is deliberate: the point is to describe a life, not to widen a net. If the result count collapses, take the least important one back off rather than assuming the city has nothing.

Only the nearest of each type counts. One distance is stored per listing per category, up to a 1,500-metre ceiling. Beyond that ceiling a listing counts as not near that category at all and drops out of the results, so nothing sneaks in from an adjacent suburb.

The categories themselves come from mapped public data rather than from what a seller typed into a description box, which is why the filter behaves consistently in a Czech city and a Spanish one. A seller cannot talk their listing into being near a metro station.

How do I find a home within walking distance of a school?

Set the location, set buy or rent, then tick School under nearby amenities. If you have small children, add Kindergarten and Playground, and if the walk to school matters more than the walk to work, leave transport off entirely so you are not quietly narrowing to the tram corridors.

Worked example: apartments for sale in Prague with a school and a metro station in range. You can save or share a search that already has your nearby filters applied, so a partner or an agent opens exactly the set you were looking at, and it comes back the same way tomorrow, which the "I panned the map to about here" approach does not.

One honest limit: the filter tells you a school is 400 metres away, not whether it is a good school or whether your child will get a place. Catchment rules are municipal and vary by country. Use the filter to build the shortlist, then check the specific school.

How do I find apartments near a metro station?

Tick Metro, and consider whether you mean it literally. In cities where the metro is thin but the tram network is dense, adding Tram instead of Metro usually returns a better set, and in most European cities Bus barely narrows anything, because bus stops are everywhere.

The pattern that works best for commuters is transport plus one daily errand: metro and supermarket, or tram and pharmacy. Two categories keeps the result list usable while ruling out the addresses that look central on a map and are a fifteen-minute walk from anything.

The map itself will show you the places, not just the properties. Zoom in past street level and the mapped locations appear as their own markers, with supermarkets and schools shown by default, so you can see the shape of a neighbourhood while you scan the listings rather than reconstructing it afterwards.

Can I combine nearby places with the usual filters?

Yes, and this is where the shortlist gets short. Alongside the location filters, the panel carries the ones that describe the home itself: price and size ranges, layout, floor range, building condition, and toggles for lift, barrier-free and furnished, plus short-term for rentals. A first-floor walk-up with no lift is a different proposition at 70 than at 30, and the barrier-free toggle answers a question that is otherwise buried in the description text of every listing you open.

Two further filters sit at the bottom of the panel. Listing grade filters out the half-finished adverts with two photos and no description, which is useful when you are scanning quickly. Minimum location score works from the same mapped data as the nearby filter, scoring transit, everyday amenities, family facilities, walkability, culture and green space around each address, so it is a blunt version of the same idea for when you have no specific place in mind. Both are explained in what the listing grade and location score measure.

Order of operations matters. Set the place and the nearby categories first, then tighten price and size. Doing it the other way round leaves you staring at an empty result set with no idea which of the seven filters emptied it.

Can I just type what I want instead of clicking filters?

That is usually faster. Describe the home in a sentence, in your own language, and the search reads out the place, the buy or rent intent, the property type, the budget and any nearby places you mentioned, then applies them as filters. "Three-room flat in Vienna near a tram stop and a park, under €400,000" lands on the same filtered result as ticking the boxes by hand.

It resolves one location per query, so it is a way to describe a search rather than to run several at once. If you are weighing cities against each other, that is a different job: how to search property across several European countries covers the comparison tools and the cross-border map, and how natural-language property search works explains what the assistant does with your sentence and where it asks a follow-up instead of guessing.

The same search is reachable from inside ChatGPT and Claude through the Seeki.eu connector, with no account needed, which is convenient if you are already discussing a move with an assistant and would rather not open another tab.

Frequently asked questions

Which property sites let me search by amenities rather than just price?

Seeki.eu filters listings by what is within 500 metres of the address: schools, kindergartens, universities, metro, tram and bus stops, parks, playgrounds, supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitals, gyms, restaurants, libraries, museums, theatres, cinemas, galleries, arts centres and community centres. Distances are worked out for each listing from mapped public data, so the filter is exact rather than a radius drawn around a district, and it works the same way in every market Seeki.eu covers.

How do I find a home within walking distance of a school?

Set your city, choose buy or rent, then tick School under nearby amenities. Every listing returned has a school within 500 metres of the door, about a six-minute walk. Add Kindergarten or Playground if you have younger children. The search can be saved or shared, filters and all. The filter cannot tell you whether the school is a good one or whether your child will get a place, so check the specific school afterwards.

Where can I find apartments near a metro station?

Tick Metro under nearby amenities and the results are limited to listings with a station inside the 500-metre radius. In cities with a dense tram network and a thin metro, ticking Tram instead usually returns a better set. Pair transport with one everyday category, such as supermarket or pharmacy, to rule out addresses that look central but are a long walk from anything.

What counts as walking distance?

Five hundred metres from the property to the place, measured straight-line, which is roughly six minutes at a normal pace. Straight-line is not a routed walk, so a station on the far side of a river or a railway can still qualify. Distances are stored up to a 1,500-metre ceiling, and anything beyond that is treated as not nearby at all rather than being ranked lower.

Can I filter for several things nearby at once?

Yes, and every category you tick must be in range, not just one of them. School plus park plus supermarket returns only the listings that have all three within 500 metres. If that empties the results, remove the least important category rather than assuming the city has nothing to offer. Two or three categories is usually the sweet spot for a usable shortlist.

Does this work outside my own country?

Yes. The filter uses mapped public data rather than seller-written text, so it behaves the same in Prague, Valencia or Rotterdam, and the interface, the place names and the currency follow whatever you have chosen rather than the country the listing is in. That matters most when you are searching somewhere you have never lived and have no feel for which district means what.

Where to start

Pick the city, pick the one or two things your week actually depends on, and let the price filter come last. Most people find that the map they end up with looks nothing like the districts they were told to look at, which is the point: a good address is a specific place, not a reputation.