Bay Area Sold Homes began with my disappointment in the tools provided by the Real Estate Industry.
We had a fantastic real estate agent (Hope Broderick), but I was frustrated with the lack of access to data for us, the buyer or consumer.
The main tool for the real estate agents is the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), and they pay thousands of dollars a piece each year just to access it. But it doesn't provide useful information for their clients. It provides amazing information to the agents, but the breadth of information contained therein is not usually passed on to the consumer.
Sure, we were given comparables. But those records are specifically chosen either by the MLS or the real estate agents to prove that the price we were planning on paying for a house or building was within line with the market. Where's the information telling us that we're getting a deal, or that we're about to break the upper cost for a particular neighborhood?
All we know is that there are, in fact, houses that confirm the price we're about to pay to purchase a home is acceptable.
Even with the comparables we were provided with, we had no way of comparing them with each other. Each comparable was a separate record. It was so much work to map them and attempt to remember where the previous ones were.
Sometimes I feel like it's in the industry's advantage to not have you know that much information about the entire market. All they want you to do is pick a house, pay for it, and remain relatively uninformed. Information is power, and the MLS sure has a lot of power, don't they?
Thus, this map was born. (Boy, do I wish I had a tool like this when we bought our house. Sadly, it wasn't completed until months later..)
I wanted a way to see all the houses that were sold in a neighborhood filtered by time period, filtered by price, filtered by everything that you can currently do on the map page.
I wanted to know if I was about to pay the most in a neighborhood. And you can do all this with this map.
As part of this project, I got my sales person real estate license in August 2006. Eventually I hope to have another map page that will list all open houses, so that you can easily find the open houses that fit the properties you're looking for.
Enjoy!
Erica Frandsen
Erica at BayAreaSoldHomes dot com