zillow
February 9th, 2006 by Lawrence David
christina being a finance major, and all, went ahead the other day and calculated how much money we’d spend renting for our > 5 years here in massachusetts, as opposed to just buying a place of our own. turns out by living the american dream, we’d save well over half a 100 grand, assuming that property values increase at the level of inflation.
so we’ve been combing craigslist now, trying to gain some intuition for how much things are worth around the boston area. i even started writing some code to start building some datasets, to see if there were any trends ….
but in a wonderful stroke of good timing, zillow has come out of beta. if you’re thinking of buying/selling your house or are even just curious how much the apartment you’re renting is worth, i highly recommend checking this site out. zillow cleanly summarizes a bunch of data from real estate sales databases in a slick google maps-ish UI. in addition, the site auto-generates useful property value graphs, giving you an indication of how prices have been evolving over time in a given area.
