The Chapel Ridge Community near Chapel Hill, NC, is popular with families.  Since Chapel Hill is a large city, schools can vary from one district to the next.  Sites like Great Schools.net can help parents narrow the choices on where to live.

     Yesterday we reviewed the real estate sites Trulia and Zillow.  Today we offer a few more sites.   Each should be taken with something of a grain of salt but might provide you with helpful information you won't find in community marketing brochures.  

RottenNeighbor.com

    A sage Greek once wrote that, "Those who plot the destruction of others fall themselves."  This could be the unintended motto of RottenNeighbor.com whose raison d'etre is simple, but the consequences less so.  Essentially, the site provides the ability to gore the ox of any of our neighbors who have offended us or, in our opinion, community sensibility.  It also purports to warn the rest of us about the cantankerous old coot who could wind up as our next door neighbor.
    Consider this RottenNeighbor posting by someone in Gulfport, MS:  "The old man that lives here constantly stares at young women and gives lude (sic) remarks and gestures toward them. He waits until his wife/girlfriend is in the house and then starts staring. He is disgusting. If you're a young woman, don't live next to this guy. You won't get any sleep for fear of what he might do if he catches you before the door closes."  
    The letter writer's over-heated prose would make me leery about living next door to him (if it is a him).   And who knows whether the allegations are true or not.  Let's say, though, for the sake of argument, that the writer is being honest and helpful.  If he owns his own home, by definition he has lowered its value by warning away potential buyers from buying next door.  At best, this is both noble and stupid and at worst, if he is lying, nasty and destructive.  No thank you; I'll spend my limited time on other sites.

StreetAdvisor.com

People stop and stare, they don't bother me,

For there's nowhere else on earth that I would
rather be.

Let the time go by, I won't care if I

Can be here on the street where you live.
        -- from My Fair Lady

    Equally self-serving, but from a prop-up-your-property value standpoint, is StreetAdvisor.com, another site that offers you the opportunity to praise your neighbors, or to bury them.  But since the mission of the site is to advise, rather than to trash, the bias seems to be more toward objectivity.
    "Try and write about things that you would want to know if you were moving into a new street," the site implores.  "For example, what is the traffic like weekends? Is there a lot of social activity on the street?  Are there a lot of dogs that bark at night?"
    StreetAdvisor strikes us as a good idea, but it is limited, at this point, by the scarcity of messages from its users.  I was invited to be the first one on my block at my Connecticut and South Carolina homes to offer some thoughts about life on the streets.  StreetAdvisor posts scores for each street based on its users' ratings.  I checked out the densely populated 1st Avenue in New York City where my wife and I once lived.  It's nice rating of 88 (on a scale of 100) was the result of just one review, an indication that the site has not yet gained traction.
    StreetAdvisor will eventually be useful but, for now, it will satisfy those with an inclination to praise or trash their neighborhoods, not those of us looking to move in.

GreatSchools.net

    Okay, so you have raised your children and gotten them through public schools and college.  Congratulations.  Now, the last thing on your mind is the quality of the schools in a community you are considering a move to. 

    Not so fast.  The quality of life and the stability of an area is often reflected in the quality of its schools, and while we would not put schools at the top of the list of criteria for a retired couple searching for a new place to live, we wouldn't discount it either.
    GreatSchools is a simple, efficient way to check out the "report cards" on schools by zip code or town name.  The site will help you find the best schools in a particular zip code and then compare them with other schools in other zip codes.  This is particularly helpful in a spread-out city with multiple golf course communities and some variation in the quality of schools (such as Chapel Hill, NC, where some schools are near the best in the nation and others are below that level).  GreatSchools will also search for top-rated schools by state.
    For empty nesters, GreatSchools is a nice tool to have in assessing a particular area.  For those with school-age children, it could prove invaluable.

Web sites Trulia and Zillow do not capture most of the properties for sale in Pawleys Plantation, the golf community in Pawleys Island, SC.

    The purchase of a new home, whether on a golf course or elsewhere, is always fraught with risk.  You can hire a qualified engineering inspector to make sure the pipes don't leak and a rodent population won't steal your gouda, but whether you are paying at or above market price for the house, whether the local schools are good or bad and whether your neighbors mow their lawns or park their cars on them requires more aggressive research and some uncomfortable questions.
    According to the Wall Street Journal, some web sites can help you answer a few of these questions.  We took some of the sites for our own brief test ride today, using our hometowns of Avon, CT (primary) and Pawleys Island, SC (second-home) as the basis.  We report on two of the sites here today and will include others tomorrow.

Trulia.com

    When it works, Trulia can provide meaningful information about real estate offerings and prices in a particular area, right down to the zip code and street.  We searched by the Pawleys Island zip code of 29585 and Trulia identified 518 homes for sale in all price ranges.  The site offers the option of indicating what type of home you are looking for (condo, single-family, etc.) and to specify the numbers of bedrooms and baths, square footage and price range.  I filled in as much information as I was asked about what home I was looking for, but clicking on "search" didn't yield a thing; the page stayed where it was.  No map popped up in the area it was supposed to, and clicking on the "expand map" button yielded nothing.  I was able to invoke the map later, but even though 518 homes were for sale in the area, the map showed only one of those little pushpins that indicate location of homes for sale.  Something wasn't clicking on Trulia's server.  I had exactly the same experience when I entered our Avon, CT, information.
    I tried a workaround by clicking on an area that promised more information on Pawleys Island, and that delivered a range of recent prices for sold properties, as well as a map with a working zoom function.  The site also permitted me to input a price range, type of home and numbers of bedrooms and baths.  A price range of $300,000 to $600,000 for condos yielded four listings in the zip code, but none in Pawleys Plantation where our home is and where I know there are condos on the market.  I then lowered the bottom of the range to $200,000, and Trulia added another five listings.  But as for getting down to the street level in Pawleys Island, I could not make that part of the map function work.
    Trulia also provides useful information about the overall market, including median sales prices and average listing prices.  The site also maintains a discussion area where agents, sellers and buyers can post their questions and thoughts.  It led me to a local real estate blog site I found interesting.  Trulia's usage and relevance should grow over time, especially once it becomes more user friendly.

Zillow.com

    I've written about Zillow here before.  Whereas Trulia's strength seems to be in assessing an entire market, Zillow's shtick is to get down to the neighborhood level to provide value estimates.  Zillow claims 70 million homes in its database, and although I had some problems a few months ago getting more than just a handful of listings per zip code, Zillow's claims and reality seem now to have converged.  When I invoked the Pawleys Island zip code, up popped a map with 56 flags denoting homes for sale, homes recently sold and three whose owners haven't listed their homes but would listen to offers.  This latter function is called "Make Me Move."
    Zillow's own map function could use some sprucing up too.  I found a number of homes recently sold and for sale in Pawleys Plantation, which of course would be useful information if we were intending to sell soon (we are not).  But when I clicked on the little pushpins on my street, most of them did not yield an address but rather just said "SC" for South Carolina.  I had to try to interpret by the position on the map what the address might be.  And whereas condos in our building of six units were once "zestimated," as Zillow calls its algorithm for providing a range of house values, none of the homes in our condo building were listed this time around, although a group of them just down the street were.
    As for the three "Make Me Move" homes, they were in the northern part of the zip code, far from our condo, but the fact that the owners listed their "dream" asking price seemed useful to me.  Overall, I think Zillow is fun to use and its price ranges on its "zestimates" wide enough that you can probably trust that the value of your home - or the one you might be making an offer on - is somewhere in the target.  Still, the best estimator of the right price is the real estate agent representing you as buyer or seller.