Househunting from Space

When the first great suburban expansion occurred after World War II, Sputnik had yet to fly. Soon, though, came satellites that could read license plates on cars parked outside the Chinese embassy and aerial photography that could tote up Russian missiles. With the end of the Cold War, this eye-in-the-sky technology was released for commercial use—just in time for the current real-estate boom. Thanks to a rash of Internet sites that use satellite photography, prospective homebuyers can check out not just asking prices, but how "close to all" a home really is, the traffic out front, even the number of pickup trucks rusting in the driveway next door. The sites also make playing the “How Much Is My House Worth?” parlor game a lot more fun.

All of the sites combine real-estate listings and recent sales with Yahoo maps or Google's satellite photography feature to provide serious intelligence for house shoppers. Some cater to buyers who already know want they want, where, and to real-estate pros who want to reach them with beefed up listings. Trulia, one of our favorites, is a California-based site that has recently expanded to the East Coast. Besides the satmap, Trulia offers little more than an agency’s own site would, including photos and classified-ad chat about each property. But of all the realty sites, Trulia is the fastest, easiest to navigate and has nothing up its sleeve. HomePages, an offshoot of the home appraisal site HomeValues, is oriented to those trying to acquaint themselves with new turf; shoppers can load up the bird’s eye view of a targeted town with virtual thumbtacks locating public schools and school-district borders, post offices and other amenities.

Another class of site attempts to nail down the perfect price for your home. Zillow claims it can calculate the value of your home within a median margin of error of 7.2 percent, using not only recent local sales but tax numbers and other government data. Zillow needs some coaching and sometimes can’t get it right: Our guinea pig “Zestimate” repeatedly put the market value of a home we’re familiar with at $2,714, off by approximately the entire worth of the place. Similarly, Property Shark had lots of bells and whistles, but we couldn’t get it to price a home at all—though one suspects better service could be had if we ponied up for the pay-only subscriber information.

None of these sites purports to do a better job than your local real-estate office, and most point you directly to the agent who can help you best. But the Internet (another Pentagon invention turned over to civilian use) is clearly going to be a major avenue for home sales soon and forever. Doubters need only register that NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch’s multinational media company, is busily acquiring real-estate sites back home in Australia.