Thursday, March 23, 2006
Important information for baby boomers checking retirement housing options
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The real estate value boom did not bypass our neighborhood, we too have seen the numbers rise dramatically since the March 2000 stock market collapse, particularly in the many coop buildings. Checking neighborhood apartment values is a favorite Sunday paper reading activity, rivaling the crossword puzzle (cannot speak for Sudoku, a puzzle for those who don’t want to test their memories but like to keep the brain active).
The Internet smarties have developed several web sites for those among us who want to capitalize on NYC property value boosts - baby boomers ready to trade towards retirement homes, people who should like to get out of New York; we had a flurry of this flight after 9/11/2001, with cityites flocking to my favorite upstate area. Looking into these resources reveals astounding riches if information and also misdirection, a fascinating game for the curious.
A good source is www.propertyshark.com. Entering my coop building’s address revealed a treasure trove – alternate addresses, school district, Community Board District data, square feet of the building, number of units. Photographs of the building that could be enlarged and manipulated on screen, practically permitting peeping into one’s bedroom windows. Clicking on an on-line offering of info about political contributions brought on a site named Fundrace 2004, showing the dollars my neighbors, up and down the street, contributed to DNC and RNC, to Kerry and Bush, all small sums, private insights that we individuals should be spared. I feel embarrassed to tell you about it, but there’s a purpose - if anyone wants to start a campaign about the privacy of donations of a few hundred bucks, count me in. But I digress.
Domania.com, owned by LendingTree, LLC, offers to get the value of your property for you, if you sign up, no charge. I did not, with this, nor with any of the other web sites that want personal data; there are enough real estate and mortgage refinance spams coming my way, as is.
A new site, just starting its beta distribution (that’s computerese for test version) is www.zillow.com, an enterprise started by Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, the Internet travel agency, the grandparent of the several on-line flight bookers who are now placing for 80% of travel reservations, while 40% of travel agents have closed shop since 1994 – not my data, this per Financial Times. Expedia was spun off Microsoft in 1999, sold to IAC (former US Interactive, run by Barry Diller, owner of LendingTree, Ask Jeeves, Ticketmaster, CitySearch) in 2003, spun off again in 2005. Zillow claims to have records on 60 million homes nationwide, collected from county property offices, including gas sales and changed assessments. Enter the address you are interested in, and the system will find records of comparable properties in the neighborhood. Additionally, an area photograph will show your block and partial views of surrounding ones, with intriguing dollar values of sales superimposed over the buildings – apparently mixing house and apartment sales. A compass permits you to move the map around. As to the comparables, my entry conjured up a sales history that had no applicability, and the value shown was less than half of the ones applicable to my neighborhood. But the information was fascinating, and some day Zillow may get it right – or maybe not. Matthew Haines of PropertyShark contends that each property is unique and a computer program cannot calculate values accurately. However, we all know that comparable sales constitute a major factor in mortgage lenders’ valuation decisions. So, it should at least provide a major piece of information in buyers’ reviews of affordable areas, or potential sellers’ decision-making processes. Barton claims he can offer one piece of information that other sites lack – he has data about whether a building needs a new roof.
Zillow is competing with Domania, as a well as HomeGard, HouseValues and
Realtor.com, the web site listing for sale houses, owned by the National Association of Realtors. Despite the impressive credentials, a sampling of its 2 million listings, using my criteria of a typical local price in an out-of-town area familiar to us brought invalid information.
Best reliable sources of home and apartment values can be the multiple listings services (MLX) set up by brokers throughout the US, but the usefulness of the data depends on the area. In certain towns in Florida you the outsider can get a free listing of all residential properties for sale within an area of one or a few blocks, with descriptions, prices and pretty near complete addresses (mostly not including the apartment numbers). The brokers feel quite protected from any sneaky attempts of private sales of listed and advertised homes. In East Midtown the Internet search of MLX and Manhattan brings on Homeline, the consumer side of a multiple listings service, offering to produce for you addresses of rental apartments in, say, the Gramercy area, no broker fees involved, from an inventory of 6,000 Manhattan listings. I passed, once more unwilling to provide a full range of my personal identity data. Sorry, gang.
Wally Dobelis thanks the Financial Times.
The real estate value boom did not bypass our neighborhood, we too have seen the numbers rise dramatically since the March 2000 stock market collapse, particularly in the many coop buildings. Checking neighborhood apartment values is a favorite Sunday paper reading activity, rivaling the crossword puzzle (cannot speak for Sudoku, a puzzle for those who don’t want to test their memories but like to keep the brain active).
The Internet smarties have developed several web sites for those among us who want to capitalize on NYC property value boosts - baby boomers ready to trade towards retirement homes, people who should like to get out of New York; we had a flurry of this flight after 9/11/2001, with cityites flocking to my favorite upstate area. Looking into these resources reveals astounding riches if information and also misdirection, a fascinating game for the curious.
A good source is www.propertyshark.com. Entering my coop building’s address revealed a treasure trove – alternate addresses, school district, Community Board District data, square feet of the building, number of units. Photographs of the building that could be enlarged and manipulated on screen, practically permitting peeping into one’s bedroom windows. Clicking on an on-line offering of info about political contributions brought on a site named Fundrace 2004, showing the dollars my neighbors, up and down the street, contributed to DNC and RNC, to Kerry and Bush, all small sums, private insights that we individuals should be spared. I feel embarrassed to tell you about it, but there’s a purpose - if anyone wants to start a campaign about the privacy of donations of a few hundred bucks, count me in. But I digress.
Domania.com, owned by LendingTree, LLC, offers to get the value of your property for you, if you sign up, no charge. I did not, with this, nor with any of the other web sites that want personal data; there are enough real estate and mortgage refinance spams coming my way, as is.
A new site, just starting its beta distribution (that’s computerese for test version) is www.zillow.com, an enterprise started by Richard Barton, the founder of Expedia, the Internet travel agency, the grandparent of the several on-line flight bookers who are now placing for 80% of travel reservations, while 40% of travel agents have closed shop since 1994 – not my data, this per Financial Times. Expedia was spun off Microsoft in 1999, sold to IAC (former US Interactive, run by Barry Diller, owner of LendingTree, Ask Jeeves, Ticketmaster, CitySearch) in 2003, spun off again in 2005. Zillow claims to have records on 60 million homes nationwide, collected from county property offices, including gas sales and changed assessments. Enter the address you are interested in, and the system will find records of comparable properties in the neighborhood. Additionally, an area photograph will show your block and partial views of surrounding ones, with intriguing dollar values of sales superimposed over the buildings – apparently mixing house and apartment sales. A compass permits you to move the map around. As to the comparables, my entry conjured up a sales history that had no applicability, and the value shown was less than half of the ones applicable to my neighborhood. But the information was fascinating, and some day Zillow may get it right – or maybe not. Matthew Haines of PropertyShark contends that each property is unique and a computer program cannot calculate values accurately. However, we all know that comparable sales constitute a major factor in mortgage lenders’ valuation decisions. So, it should at least provide a major piece of information in buyers’ reviews of affordable areas, or potential sellers’ decision-making processes. Barton claims he can offer one piece of information that other sites lack – he has data about whether a building needs a new roof.
Zillow is competing with Domania, as a well as HomeGard, HouseValues and
Realtor.com, the web site listing for sale houses, owned by the National Association of Realtors. Despite the impressive credentials, a sampling of its 2 million listings, using my criteria of a typical local price in an out-of-town area familiar to us brought invalid information.
Best reliable sources of home and apartment values can be the multiple listings services (MLX) set up by brokers throughout the US, but the usefulness of the data depends on the area. In certain towns in Florida you the outsider can get a free listing of all residential properties for sale within an area of one or a few blocks, with descriptions, prices and pretty near complete addresses (mostly not including the apartment numbers). The brokers feel quite protected from any sneaky attempts of private sales of listed and advertised homes. In East Midtown the Internet search of MLX and Manhattan brings on Homeline, the consumer side of a multiple listings service, offering to produce for you addresses of rental apartments in, say, the Gramercy area, no broker fees involved, from an inventory of 6,000 Manhattan listings. I passed, once more unwilling to provide a full range of my personal identity data. Sorry, gang.
Wally Dobelis thanks the Financial Times.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 5:45 PM 
