House Voyeurs, Click Here [WSJ]
Real-Estate Snoops Use Sites To Check Bosses, Ex-Wives;
'They Paid $780,000 for This?'
By KEVIN J. DELANEY
May 5, 2006; Page W1
The U.S. housing market may be cooling off, but the nation's obsession with real estate shows no signs of abating.
Just as spurned lovers use Google to monitor the ex, real-estate fanatics are tapping into new Web sites that tell them instantly what friends, neighbors and co-workers paid for their houses. As the sites gain traffic, home-price voyeurism is reaching new heights. In arming nosy searchers with a key financial metric, these sites are pulling back the curtain on one of the last private aspects of American life.
Earlier this year, RealEstateABC.com and Zillow.com started providing free access to historical purchase prices, estimates of current values, square-footage and aerial images of houses across the country. (It's even spawned a new verb: to "Zillow" one's neighbors.) The information, available for tens of millions of homes, comes from government records and other suppliers of public data, with estimates of a home's current values coming from the sites' own calculations. To get started, inquiring minds need nothing more than a property's address.
WEB ADDRESS TO HOME ADDRESS
See more free Web sites with public real-estate data.With the new tools, consumers are going on a snooping spree. Philip Koss says he has keyed in his own home, searched friends' places -- even Zillowed his boss. (He got the address from an office Christmas-party invitation; the boss's place was valued at about $2 million). Recently, after receiving an invitation to dinner at the new home of some friends, the 32-year-old architect in Pasadena, Calif., and his wife searched that address, too. Before dinner, as the friends showed off their small fixer-upper, Mr. Koss and his wife struggled to contain their disbelief. After the tour, his wife leaned over to confide: "I can't believe they paid $780,000 for this thing."
Home-value searches have turned into something of a parlor game. After a wedding last month, Yvonne Bylund and a handful of other guests retired to a friend's home, where talk turned to real estate. Soon the party was gathered around a computer, firing out potential search targets. Women fished their address books out of their purses, says the 49-year-old, who lives in Anaheim, Calif. One man pulled up his ex-wife's address, while a woman checked on her ex-husband. One guest was stunned to learn the price of her boss's house. "We all felt kind of guilty," says Ms. Bylund.
Americans have always had a healthy interest in what the next guy paid for his house. But traditionally only determined busybodies went to the lengths required to find the information -- chatting up loose-lipped real-estate agents, tracking down tax records filed in dusty corners of government offices, using fee-based services or consulting often-unwieldy county and state Web sites.
The new sites play perfectly into the country's real-estate preoccupation. With median existing house prices up more than 50% over the past five years, real estate has largely replaced the stock market in terms of maniacal focus for many Americans. Housing represented 34% of household assets at the end of 2005, compared to 24% at the start of 2000, according to Moody's Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa.
'They Clearly Have an Inheritance'
Now home sales are cooling in some major markets, and unsold housing inventories have risen significantly over last year on average for the U.S. Earlier this week, the National Association of Realtors reported that its index of pending sales of existing homes fell 6% in March compared with the same month last year. Concerns about the market have some consumers checking in frequently to monitor the values of their homes, much as investors during the Internet boom monitored their portfolios hourly.
When Lindsey Bickel heard about Zillow, the first thing she did was check her own condo. Then the 27-year-old marketer for Seattle Pacific University checked on all of the addresses she knew by heart, and, later, spent about four hours going through her Microsoft Outlook address book to look up her friends' homes. There were some surprises, including a young couple whose new home was valued at about $700,000. Says Ms. Bickel: "They clearly have an inheritance."
The new home-price searches serve as the latest example of how the Internet has enabled Americans' inner snoops. The Web site Fundrace.org, for example, created a stir when it began letting consumers easily check on the campaign contributions of neighbors during the last presidential election. Voyeurs use Google's free Earth service to access detailed aerial images of celebrities' properties.
Knowing the price tag on another's home can make for some socially perilous situations. At a party in March, Bobbie Conti was taken aback when an acquaintance recited the price Ms. Conti paid for her home and its current value. Ms. Conti, a 32-year-old industry data analyst in Sammamish, Wash., had kept the house following a December divorce and was uncomfortable with the guest's inferences. "You don't really expect people to have that kind of insight," she says. Ms. Conti says the acquaintance rents her home, so she couldn't do any prying in return.
For their part, the real-estate sites say they're only making available data that was already public. Internet Brands executives say their research indicates that the vast majority of users of RealEstateABC's service are searching homes they own or are considering buying.
And as many home voyeurs have learned, the sites' information can be far from complete. Their operators concede some of the information about homes they get from data providers and government sources may be outdated or contain inaccuracies. A number of states and counties don't provide actual sales prices as part of the public record. (Often, the prices can be estimated using other public data.) Market oddities make other information hard to obtain: Sales data for New York cooperative apartments, for example, are typically not filed with the county. In other cases, the sites haven't yet gathered the information: Zillow says it hasn't yet obtained data yet from states, including New Hampshire and Maine. (In all, Zillow says it has data on about 65 million homes, and valuation estimates for 47 million.)
The sites also don't guarantee accuracy of the prices they furnish. Their operators say their current home-price estimates are based on complex formulas that factor in elements such as recent sale prices for comparable homes in the neighborhood. But these estimates can vary from the going market price, for example, if owners have made significant renovations. Most of the time, the services say, they're within 10% of the actual market price.
Getting a 'Double Stare'
Precise or not, the sites are gaining a growing following. RealEstateABC launched the home-valuation portion of its service on March 30, and says the number of user visits doubled in April from March. When Zillow launched on Feb. 8, the site was so swamped with users that it shut down for a few hours. Zillow had about 2.3 million U.S. visitors in March, according to research firm comScore Networks Inc.
For now, though, the information still has the capacity to shock the uninitiated. Keith Richman says he drew a "double stare" when he commented on the large size of a former colleague's childhood home during a meeting last month. Mr. Richman had the ex-co-worker's parents in his address book, and searched their house before their meeting. Says Mr. Richman, a 33-year-old chief executive of a Los Angeles Internet company: "He looked at me like I was a stalker." |
