You can find the average household expenditure in a radius using radius mapping software.
Consumer Expenditure Data can be leveraged to find the amount spent on a product for a given area.
This tutorial explains how to create a temporary radius buffer and get household expenditure data for the encircled area.
Before following the steps in this article, you can download a free mapping software trial of Maptitude Desktop or use your existing Maptitude Desktop license.
- Download and install the Consumer Expenditure Data available for free to Maptitude users.
- Open a map that contains the Consumer Expenditure layer and zoom or pan to the area of interest.
- Choose Tools>Analysis>Buffers Toolbar.
- Click
, then click on the map at the center of the location that you want to study. - Click
, then click No when prompted to save the point to a layer. - Enter one or more radii in the Sizes box (For example, enter 3, 5, 7 to create buffers of 3, 5, and 7 miles)
- Check the Calculate Demographics and Cumulative Buffers boxes, and click
. - Choose Consumer Expenditure from the With Layer drop-down and click OK.
- Click OK to create the buffers.
Maptitude creates buffers around the location of choice and calculates the annual average household expenditure for a variety of items. A Dataview containing purchasing data for the area will be displayed. This Dataview can be searched for a specific expense using the following steps:
- With the Dataview as the active window, click
. - Click on the Field drop-down and type a portion of the name of the field that you would like to examine (for example, type Property to filter the fields and find the [Avg Property Taxes] field), and click OK.
The dataview will zoom to the field you selected and you can view the average household expenditure in your desired category for the different buffers you created.
To find demographic information for a set of ZIP Codes, please see the Maptitude tutorial article on finding demographics for a set of areas.