College towns like Chapel Hill, NC, offer excellent golf, such as the University of North Carolina's Finley course.      

    The most expensive and least expensive houses in college towns in the U.S. are about $1.5 million apart, according to a recent press release from the real estate firm Coldwell Banker.  The median price for a 2,200 square-foot 4-bedroom, 2 ½-bath home in Palo Alto, CA, the home of Stanford University, is pegged at $1.68 million.  Near Ball State in Muncie, IN, the same size home will cost you just $150,000.
    The Coldwell Banker survey, the press release indicated, took some inspiration from a famous game-ending play 25 years ago in November when Stanford and the University of California played their annual football game.  Current Coldwell sales agent Kevin Moen scored the winning touchdown for Cal on the final play of the game, threading his way through the Stanford marching band that had run onto the field to celebrate a likely victory just seconds before an improbable defeat.
    With our son now at college and essentially forced to live off campus from his sophomore year on, I've considered the practical and financial implications of buying a house near his campus in Virginia.  Coldwell Banker's CEO, Jim Gillespie, says I'm not the first to think about it.    
    "Real estate professionals have been doing this for years," Gillespie said in the press release. "Once their child is able to live off-campus, they do so in the family-owned home with classmates paying rent as roommates.  Over time, the home appreciates in value and the family can keep it or sell it with the proceeds going toward the college payments."

   That same logic applies to anyone looking for a vibrant place to live, with good golf nearby.  College enrollments rarely fluctuate, except upwards, which builds stability into the local real estate market.  Prices in the markets below haven't quite taken the hits in prices of other markets with less predictable economies.    

    All the southern college towns we have reviewed are listed in the Coldwell Banker survey.  Prices below are calculated by Coldwell for zip codes popular with middle managers working in local corporations.  Prices from one zip code to the next within an individual town may vary significantly.  Median home prices listed here were calculated in October 2007:

Columbia, SC (U of South Carolina), $199,000
Knoxville, TN (U of Tennessee), $202,000
Winston-Salem, NC (Wake Forest), $229,000
Durham, NC (Duke), $230,000
Raleigh, NC (NC State), $238,000
Austin, TX ((U of Texas), $243,000
Athens, GA (U of Georgia), $249,000
Atlanta, GA (Georgia Tech), $324,000
Charlottesville, VA (UVA), $374,000
Chapel Hill, NC (UNC), $388,000

You will find the full list of college towns and prices at the Coldwell Banker web site.

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.