It's
not enough to keep up with the Joneses. Now,
homeowners want to know how much their neighbors
paid for their houses and how much their own is
worth — even if they have no intention of
selling.
The home-buying boom has created legions of
real-estate voyeurs cruising free Web sites such
as Domania (www.domania.com),
ForSaleByOwner.com (www.forsalebyowner.com)
and HomeRadar.com (www.homeradar.com)
to find sales prices for homes in their
neighborhoods.
Many who peruse these sites are people looking
for an edge as they buy and sell homes. Others
surf these sites to obsessively track what's
increasingly their
No. 1 investment — their house — much as
they would check a stock's price. And then there
are those who just enjoy anonymously spying on
their neighbors.
"This is the new form of snooping in
somebody else's medicine cabinet. In this case,
the shelf won't fall down," says Mark
Lesswing, technology guru for the National
Association of Realtors.
As real estate becomes the national
conversation, 21.6 million Web surfers, or 15
percent of the active Web population, visited a
real-estate or apartment site in April, up 26
percent from six months earlier, according to
Nielsen//NetRatings. Traffic to the top 10 sites
is up 54 percent during the same period. The
percentage of people using the Internet to search
for homes now is 74 percent, the Realtor group
says.
While information on these sites could raise
privacy concerns, most of it is available publicly
through county real-estate assessment sites,
townships, newspapers and consumer surveys,
according to Colby Sambrotto, chief operating
officer at ForSaleByOwner.com. The site has posted
a 142 percent increase in unique visitors in the
past six months.
One problem: Some public information can be
old, so consumers should do their own homework
with local real-estate agents and county offices.
"This is similar to consumers going to
(Kelley Blue Book) before they sell their
cars," Lesswing says. "If this makes you
a more informed consumer, then it's good for
business."
Top