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.