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Real Estate Resources Online
These are turbulent times for real estate. With home prices dropping and foreclosure rates rising, the favorable market conditions enjoyed by many homebuyers are now things of the past. The Internet provides many useful resources to help make sense of the current topsy-turvy real estate market.
Real estate search engines abound, but two are emerging as the best: Zillow and Trulia. Both sites provide maps and aerial photos of houses, blocks, even entire neighborhoods, with home prices listed next to each house: A sample map of the University Heights neighborhood can be found by clicking the link. Trulia has some especially innovative features like "Hindsight" maps, which display the growth of cities over time, and heat maps that display home-price trends.
Wondering how much your home is worth? Check out the house price calculator from the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. And how much might your Buffalo home be worth if it were located in, say, Binghamton, Beverly Hills or Boca Raton? Try Coldwell Banker's Home Price Comparison Index.
To educate yourself and stay current on recent developments, a fundamental resource is the Real Estate Journal. And class is always in session at the Mortgage Professor's Web site, where you will find sound, practical advice about mortgages and home ownership—a valuable commodity these days.
For neighborhood information, stroll over to Walk Score, a site that determines the "walkability" of neighborhoods by locating nearby schools, stores, parks and the like. At Rotten Neighbor, you can gain insight into what people really think about the person next door—their thoughts are not always neighborly. Locally, the Elmwood Village recently was included in the top 10 great neighborhoods in America by the American Planning Association.
Buffalonians live in one of the most affordable housing markets in the country—the National Association of Realtors indicates that the average price of a Buffalo-area home is about $126,000—in the bottom 10 of the more than 200 metropolitan areas tracked. And since local home prices haven't skyrocketed, they seem less likely to drop precipitously, with Buffalo generally escaping the current downturn because the area never experienced the "irrationally exuberant" upturn that much of the country did.
The City of Buffalo and other local government entities provide extensive data about local homes, such as square footage, lot size, assessment, date built, sales history and more.
To monitor local home sales prices, HomeFinderExtra is a good place to look. Just don't expect to see any Buffalo homes on Forbes' list of the most expensive houses in the U.S. That's probably a good thing!
—Charles Lyons, University Libraries