Tuesday, September 19, 2006

A better real estate website

In my hunt for an apartment, I found a website, streeteasy.com that seems to be web 2.0. It searches all real estate listings in New York. It has the typical search criteria that most websites have (e.g., price, general neighborhoods, open houses etc.) What makes this site different (from what I can tell so far) is the following:
  • You can search both sales and rentals by neighborhood, price range and size
  • You can narrow down a search to a particular school district or building style
  • They list all reductions in prices. For example, if an apartment had been listed for a week for $1,000,000 and the broker brought down the price to $800,000. Typically, unless you followed the apartment on that site, you would not know of the magnitude of the price reduction (or if the reduction happened at all). On this site, it will say: reduced by $200,000.
  • You can type in an exact building address and all listings in that building - including "recent past" availabilities are shown. This is great because you can see how much an apartment was sold in a specific building per square foot. While I'm not sure if the pricing is 100% accurate (some co-ops are impossible to get data on), it is a helpful starting point in a real estate search.

Check it out: www.streeteasy.com

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