Will It Be Bright

Will It Be Bright?—Natural light grades on Zillow & Redfin

You know that thing where you tour a house at 2pm on a sunny Saturday and think "this place is gorgeous," then move in and realize the living room is a cave by November? This fixes that.

The extension adds a brightness grade to every Zillow and Redfin listing. Excellent, Good, Fair, or Limited. No extra tabs, no separate apps.

HOW IT WORKS

Install it and keep browsing. Listings get a small colored badge. Click one for the full breakdown: which way the building faces, how many hours of direct sun hit the front windows, what changes between January and July. It walks you through the day—when morning light hits the kitchen, how the living room changes by noon, when things fade.

You can tell it whether you care most about morning light or afternoon, and it adjusts the grade. Compare up to 4 homes side by side or export a PDF to send your agent.

WHAT'S UNDER THE HOOD

We pull building footprints from OpenStreetMap to figure out which direction the front of the house faces, then calculate the sun's position for every hour of the day across all four seasons. The result is a brightness grade plus room-by-room predictions (south-facing living room = morning sun, north-facing bedroom = cool and shaded, that kind of thing).

When we can't match a building footprint, we fall back to road geometry. You'll see a confidence indicator so you know how much to trust the result.

WHY BOTHER

Listing photos don't tell you anything about light. They're shot at golden hour with every lamp in the house on. The existing sun tools (SunCalc, Shadowmap) answer "where is the sun" when the real question is "will this home feel bright in December."

South-facing homes sell at a premium for a reason. This tells you which ones are south-facing right on the zillow search listings. Or whatever way it faces.

PRIVACY

No account, no login, no data sent to our servers. Everything runs in your browser using OpenStreetMap and Nominatim (free, open-source). We don't track you.

Free for home buyers. Built by a woman who loves sunlight.