An Internet jackpot for house-price surfers
October 15, 2000
by Susan Condon Love

"You have to try this new Web site," a friend told me. "You can find out exactly what people paid for their house." This friend was using it to track sales prices on a home she had sold in California, before moving to Cleveland. Her motive was pure curiosity. I told a sister about the site. She wanted to find out the sales prices of other homes on her street in a suburb of Washington, D.C. I logged on because I wanted to know the latest sales price on a house I'd once owned in Savannah, Ga. We all had hit a gold mine with http://www.domania.com Domania recently was named to "Best of the Web: The Top 50 Financial Websites" by the editors of Money magazine. As of Oct. 2, more than 63 percent of the visitors to the money.com site had selected domania as their favorite site in the "Home Buying and Loans" category. A visit to the site shows why it is so popular. There is so much more there than just finding out what your oldest sibling paid for his or her house.

For example, you can find up-to-date mortgage rate charts for your specific city. With those in hand, the site helps you calculate a home mortgage for specific sales' prices. Domania has a free, online archive of some 21 million U.S. home sales, going back to 1987. This helps not only with finding out what homes have sold for on your street, but you can also "look up prices in a neighborhood you're considering," the site points out. If you choose to delve deeper into value checks, you can register (it's free) at the site. Than you can use its "value check" to estimate the current value of your home; determine your equity; and project future value. Value check figures, by the way, are based on projected yearly growth rate for the neighborhood, based on historical sales data.

Some of the other services on the site: You can buy a home online, find a real estate agent, find a real estate lawyer or post a change of address notice. You have access to a list of contractors for home improvement or maintenance. There are links to books for homeowners, hardware for home repair, and lawn and gardening supplies. You can surf for the best loan, get your credit report or compare home insurance quotes. Ostensibly, you can do research on the best buys for electric and gas prices, and deals on phone/internet/wireless services. I actually had a little trouble getting into those links. The precursor to domania was a service started in 1989 called INPHO, a company offering information over the phone. That grew into homepricecheck.com, which became domania.com in February of this year. It is a privately held company based in Boston. Finally, checking the links for buying and selling homes gives surfers great checklists on how to approach the whole process. All the pros and cons are mentioned about trying to sell a house yourself. It also advises on how to pick the best real estate agent. All told, this is a great site. It offers a wealth of information.