Cool Real Estate Site

Kind of a neat site for getting real estate info and values:

http://www.zillow.com/

PB

My area isn't covered...

It probably depends on how open and accessible your state/county records are. My county has all the property information online with a cool mapping interface. You can click on all your neighbors houses and see what it sold for, it's assessed price, whether or not they have payed their taxes, permits, etc.

PBinWA said:

It probably depends on how open and accessible your state/county records are. My county has all the property information online with a cool mapping interface. You can click on all your neighbors houses and see what it sold for, it's assessed price, whether or not they have payed their taxes, permits, etc.

Click to expand...

All of our stuff is online as well.
We don't have pretty maps but if you know either the owners name, house address or parcel #, it'll provide purchase price history, tax amounts...

Too bad the zillow site doesn't work for you. It appears to average the assessments and recent home sales to give you a market value estimate for your home. It also has the nice mapping interface I think this is the year our house get's re-assessed and based on some of the sales that have been going on around us we could be getting our assessment raised significantly. Yuk!

PBinWA said:

I think this is the year our house get's re-assessed and based on some of the sales that have been going on around us we could be getting our assessment raised significantly. Yuk!

Click to expand...

Is your new assessment based on an improvement or is this part of a county wide reassessment program?
Around here, they can't reassess unless it's one of those 2 conditions.

I think they do re-assessments every 4 years here. Not sure how invasive it will be but I think it is more of a drive-by and jack the value up as high as they can sort of deal. When I bought the place I got them to lower the assessed value as we bought it for around 30K less than what it was assessed for. Of course, within two years they had it back to where it was.

Additionally, in the last year, three houses all with worse views than ours sold for $160K - $300K more than we paid for ours. We got a deal and bought when the market was cool but some of the recent sale prices are just astronomical. Too many people moving to the Portland, OR and outlying areas.

I don't agree whatsoever with assesments holding any validity for the selling price of your home. From what I understand, you could do a million dollar reno inside and not really have it affect the assessed value of your property. If your building permit is somehow linked to the assessed value of your home, I have issue with that as well. If you are spending $20,000 to renovate your kitchen because it's 50 years old, it does not necessarily increase the assessed value of your property. The assessment is based on an assumption that you've got an average interior/view/whatever. It does not take into account any deviation from that.

Interesting. I looked at my house, and the value is fairly close to what I expected, about $25,000 low based on my market analysis. I'm a former real estate broker and my son is a professional appraiser, so I have a fairly decent knowledge of how to do an analysis.

The program correctly identified my house as a 4BR/3Bath, got pretty close on the square footage and nailed the lot size.

However, the mapping was off by more than a block. The house they identified as mine is more than a block South; when I scrolled up to the actual aerial photo of my house, they had a much lower price on it, and had a higher price on the 2BR house withut a pool, next door to me. So, there are some serious flaws.

It's a fun tool to start a valuation, but I would strongly recommend that it not be the only tool that is used.

Funny, My folks showed me this site last week... My house here is about $100k less than I payed for it 3yrs ago....?.... By on the other hand, their house and my old one are about right.. Georgia, doesnt appear to be as accurate as S. Florida..

Mine does not exist! Guess that means my home is "priceless".............

A local property that I know of was valued at $181,000 and it is worth about half of that. Another was valued at $375,000 and it is on the market at 3.5 Million. Seems that the values are kind of skewed. My home didn't show up on the map, so it must also be priceless. Took quite a while to find our road, since the map took me to another part of town that has a road with a similar name. The only thing that it did have correct were the tax records.

you can see my house, they just dont have the values on it. It goes right to it in fact. Photos are out of date also, does not have my barn or the paved drive in it.