The Lifelong Learner :: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are -Roosevelt ::

If you’ve been following the real estate in US, you must have at least heard these names (if not tried them). If not, I’m going to recommend these as helpful to asses the housing market, and a great help in finding your next house.

They are all real estate tools: interactive websites that allow you to search and value the houses on the market in your area, and in United States overall.

Trulia.com. It is a site that I like the most. This site puts together listings of houses for sale in your area, as well as in the whole US (noticed this last week). As I take a look at houses for sale on my street (by walking or driving), I see 3 houses for sale; on Trulia I only find 1, but there are still a lot of houses listed in the area. There are a lot of listings and you get get a good indication of what the houses are going for. They also have email updates. I just signed up for one: they’ll send me a weekly update of houses for a town in NJ.

RealEstateABC.com. I just discovered this site today and I’m already liking it. Why? Because it is putting the real information, information released by the authorities. How can I tell? I can see my parents house there and it displays the actual amount the house sold for. Wow. My parents bought a house in Garfield, NJ for $253K two years ago. Now the house can go for $350-400K. I think it is unrealistic that the houses went up so fast (has your pay increased 50-100%?).

Zillow.com. The site looks very good. However, I’m not so sure that it does a good job (at least not in Garfield). On the same site, my parents house is listed for $118K. They say it’s the tax-assessed value. Do I want to see that? How does it help me? Not sure. But I hear that in other areas it displays the actual value. Try it out.

Out of the three above, I prefer Trulia and RealEstateABC. Those tools are very cool. They give me the ability to see how much the house on the street is listed for, and then how much it actually sold. Those are tools that Internet savvy users have waited for. Finally they’re arriving. (We’ll see more of those, I think.)

ReferenceReal-Estate Snoops Use Sites To Find Prices of Others’ Houses, The Wall Street Journal Online