Internet Resources Aid
Long-Distance Buyers

Before making a move to Natick, Mass., just outside Boston, from Hermosa Beach, Calif., earlier this year, Dave Baggett conducted his cross-country home search almost entirely online.

"I spent about a year searching for houses online, based on price range," says Mr. Baggett, who is chief operating officer of ITA Software, Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., software developer. "That was the first level of screening. I found about 1,000 possible homes."

That was just the beginning. He then focused on demographics and lifestyles of the prospective neighborhoods, which "helped us narrow down the list to 40 or so homes." 

Of course, location has always been key to home buying. "When you're buying a home, you're buying more than four walls and a picket fence," says Ryan Roslansky, manager of product strategy for Yahoo Real Estate, from the popular Internet-search engine. "You're buying a neighborhood." So it isn't surprising that the Internet is turning out to be a useful tool for buyers seeking information about communities where they may move. 

In a recent survey by pollster Harris Interactive, would-be home buyers said the most important lifestyle information they want to find online concerns neighborhoods and schools. (Of course, they still want to use mortgage calculators, complete loan applications and study home listings.) 

Home buyers shouldn't rely solely on information turned up online; it can become outdated, and some online sources, such as realtors, have a vested interest in making a sale. Nonetheless, buyers can rely on many details posted on the Web when making complicated decisions about residential real estate. 

Several national sites provide slices of information that consumers can access to narrow their choices, including Sperling's Best Places, www.bestplaces.net, and Homestore Inc.'s The School Report, www.theschoolreport.com. These sites offer information about schools, including school districts, examination scores and education level of teachers, as well as details about neighborhoods, recreational opportunities and related information. With a little digging on Best Places, for example, you can do side-by-side comparisons of neighboring towns' graduation rates, burglaries and murder rates, among other revealing facts and figures. Caffeine fiends will also be pleased (or disappointed) to learn the number of Starbucks shops in any given town.

Yahoo Real Estate carries a BestPlaces.net tool that allows Web surfers to search by ZIP code. A search for the ZIP code of 94188 in San Francisco, for example, shows the neighborhood's key statistics compared to national averages. For example, its residents are a median of 33.8 years old (compared to the national average of 37.41 years) and 16.9% are college graduates (25.99% nationally), while 61.1% of households are single (44.72% nationally).

Local governments also often have statistics available online, such as http://egov.cityofchicago.org.

When house hunting last fall, Chicagoan Cindy Martin, a public-relations executive, reviewed data on that site extensively to make sure the neighborhood she selected was safe. She searched for neighborhood-crime statistics -- as Chicago crime rates can vary block by block.

Local chambers of commerce and related organizations provide quality-of-life information online.

For future Chicago-area residents, visiting the site run by the economic-development arm for the city, World Business Chicago, www.worldbusinesschicago.com, is a must. Developing the site has provided benefits for the city itself, says Paul O'Connor, the organization's executive director.

"When Boeing Co. was making its decision to relocate to Chicago from Seattle in 2001, quality-of-life information about the lifestyles available here was one of the determining factors," says Mr. O'Connor. "We have a section of our site called The Good Life that provides information about the colleges that students at particular high schools went to, what neighborhoods those high schools were located in, and recreational activities as well." 

Mr. O'Connor says that people arriving in Chicago from the coasts generally don't know that Lake Michigan is the size of a sea and the city isn't "something found on Golden Pond." And they usually don't know the Chicago area has 30 miles of beaches with volleyball courts and yacht clubs. But they can find that kind of information on his site, he says. 

Local newspapers also often present local lifestyle information online as a service to readers, as Mr. Baggett found when he searched at www.boston.com, produced by the Boston Globe newspaper staff.

The paper's neighborhood survey http://yourtown.boston.com "rated each community by quality of schools and income bracket," says Mr. Baggett. "They also ranked the communities based on environmental cleanliness, which was important to us." 

Sources of such detailed localized information can often be found by searching through leading search engines like www.google.com, www.yahoo.com and www.alltheweb.com and specifying the city you want to know more about. 

That takes trial and error, however, so some sites, including RealEstateJournal.com, "aggregate" information produced by neighborhood- and demographic-information providers and other sources, furnishing a one-stop-shopping resource for online homebuyers. 

Yahoo Real Estate provides users with information about schools from The School Report, http://list.realestate.yahoo.com/re/schools/ and neighborhoods, http://list.realestate.yahoo.com/re/neighborhood/main.html from Sperling's BestPlaces.net.

"We see very high usage within [Yahoo Real Estate] for the neighborhood profiles and school profiles," says Mr. Roslansky. "We've found the best-of-breed services online for this kind of information and brought them together under the Yahoo umbrella." 

The residential sales site eRealty.com and its online rival ZIPRealty.com also provide aggregated information on their sites. So does the site of the National Association of Realtors, www.realtor.com (which is operated by Homestore).

"The local area profile [on eRealty] gives the average population, average income, average age, number of households, and more information about the neighborhood where the home is located down to the Census block level," says Russell Capper, founder and president of Houston-based eRealty.com. This tool is from Monsterdaata, which is unrelated to Monster.com. eRealty also provides a flood-zone profile (from Floodsource.com) that tells potential buyers whether a home is located in a flood zone or whether flood insurance is needed or recommended for homes in borderline areas. This information isn't part of the [multiple-listing-service data] provided by local realtors' associations, but is provided for specific properties and is overlaid on top of the MLS data, Mr. Capper says.

Generally, this information is available free from online sites, but eRealty.com and ZIPRealty.com require users to register before they provide access to the data. This allows them to gather contact information about possible customers.

Keep in mind that the information you'll find on line may be out of date. In fact, some local multiple-listing services don't provide school information to limit their liability in case homeowners make decisions based on outdated material, says Mr. Capper.

"There have been numerous lawsuits filed by homeowners who purchased properties said to be in one school district, but [were] really in another school district," he says. "So people aren't taking the word of a real-estate agent anymore about such an important decision as the location of their house and the amenities of the neighborhood." 

Some customers, to make sure they get reliable information, pay for a subscription service, such as www.intelius.com, which charges $9.95 per property search and provides a history of individual properties.

-- Mr. Koprowski is a writer in Chicago.

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