New map shows all available residential plots in Skaraborg

In May 2025, the municipalities of Skaraborg jointly launched a brand-new service: a map that displays all available plots for detached houses and apartment buildings across all 15 municipalities. And best of all, everything is built using open data, meaning that anyone can create their own services based on the information.

Hello Tomas Monsén! You work in the municipality of Skara and are one of the people involved in developing this new service. How did you come up with the idea?

"In Skaraborg, many people move across municipal borders, so housing provision has long been a topic of joint discussion in the region. However, we hadn’t had any concrete project around it. The idea of a map originally came from Business Region Skaraborg. They handle inquiries about larger business establishments and have a map of available industrial land, but they also wanted to showcase available residential plots for developers. When we started exploring that idea, we realised it was possible to create a data-driven solution that, using open data, could display all types of available plots in a simple way."

Which plots are shown on the map?

“These are municipal plots for detached houses and multi-family housing. The idea is that both private individuals and property developers should be able to find land they want to build on. Now, anyone interested can see the entire selection instead of searching one municipality at a time.

We hope to soon expand the service to include other types of land, for example land suitable for business establishments. In the longer term, you could imagine including all kinds of information on the map. Municipalities have a lot of information that we could share!”

How did you create the map?

“The map is based on open data. All municipalities know what land they have for sale, but by entering the information according to a national standard for this type of data, we’ve been able to standardise it in a way that allows it to be shared. The map is fed with data from each municipality’s internal systems. Simply put, we’ve just added a function that turns the existing information into open data as well.”

How has the collaboration worked?

“The hardest part was explaining what we wanted to do - we couldn’t really build the map until the data existed. We solved this by creating a smaller version based on data from a few municipalities. Once we got the municipal planning directors in Skaraborg to understand what we were aiming for, we were given the green light straight away.

The municipalities had progressed to different extents with open data, so some had more work than others in adapting their systems to extract the right information, but everyone has contributed. In many small municipalities, you’re sometimes quite alone in your profession. I feel that we’ve now built a strong network around this issue and that we support each other well.

In Skaraborg, municipal boundaries aren’t that important, and many people live their lives across several municipalities, so we’re used to collaborating on many issues and at all levels.”

Now that others can also create their own services using this open data - what are your thoughts on that?

“That would be fantastic! We hope more people will use the data to create additional services. If someone does use it, it would also be great if they get in touch with suggestions on how we can improve the data even further. It would be fun to see apps built using this information, or why not an even better map!

Making this information accessible to more people is the whole idea behind making it open!”

This text has been translated with the help of AI.