Comments on: Snooping to Find the Value of Someone Else’s Home

By: Baby Joe

Baby Joe — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:00:10 +0000

Sometimes people tend not to tell the truth about the price of their home, especially if it is newly bought. I have a neighbor who never told me for how much she bought her home no matter how many times I asked. She always avoided my questions.

By: brent

brent — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 12:33:00 +0000

interesting.

i wonder if there's anything like this in australia.

I thought that america was the land of Privacy.

By: One Frugal Girl

One Frugal Girl — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 14:00:00 +0000

I think there is a big difference between looking up the values of homes in your neighborhood and snooping to find the home values of friends and family.

It's helpful to know the value of homes in your neighborhood in case you plan to get a home equity loan or line of credit or if you are thinking of selling your home in the future.

On the other hand looking up the values of your friend's homes just seems nosy.

By: the baglady

the baglady — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 04:33:00 +0000

Yup, snooping is actually now very easy to do with sites like zillow.com or real-estate.nextag.com. You can look up almost every house in the nation and get either the exact price your neighbors paid or at least the taxes they paid so you can estimate the current value!

By: Amy

Amy — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 00:08:00 +0000

I'm a big fan of Zillow, which has the last sale info along with the # of bedrooms and bathrooms and aerial photos. I was going to post on my blog a while back about how to stalk someone (Zillow, local GIS, register of deeds, etc.) because I'm curious how much I can find.

ZIllow has not just the purchase price, but an estimate of the current market value. Does not cover all of the US, and tends to be off, the site is still in testing while they get the computational models right. Still, I'm a nosy gal!

Oh, and yes: I did tell anyone who asked (and maybe a few who didn't) exactly what we paid for our house.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:21:00 +0000

What a second… the appraisal value does not mean they paid that much for the house or land. It does affect (if their state has it) property tax and insurance.

By: GeckoGirl

GeckoGirl — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:58:00 +0000

I’m similar to the first commenter. I’ve looked to see what homes in my neighborhood sold for but also because I’m nosy.

By: One Frugal Girl

One Frugal Girl — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 02:11:00 +0000

So in this case you see that your friends bought their houses when the market was low, as my husband and I did, but what if you saw that a friend paid a lot of money for his or her house? It doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about their finances. Maybe a relative left them a large inheritance or their parents gave them money for a large down payment. I don’t think the value of one’s home can always be an indicator of one’s salary or overall net worth.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 17:09:00 +0000

I live in an area where starter homes start at $500k. We’re a young family and almost all of our friends have already bought homes, but we still can’t afford to buy even though we’re making well above the median for the area.

I looked up how much all of them paid and when they bought their homes, being curious how they can afford it and we can’t. The answer was simple. We’re very young to have a kid (mid 20’s), while all our friends are in their early 30’s. They all bought just before the boom, so even though we’re all probably earning similar salaries in excess of $100k, they’re living in a house while we’re renting a shack. Tough luck. We’ll keep renting for a couple years and buy later.

By: One Frugal Girl

One Frugal Girl — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 00:39:00 +0000

To the second anonymous commenter: Truth be told I was torn by free advertising for my beach house and someone finding out my identity. In the beginning rental income far outweighed the risk of being identified by someone I know. I'm actually not worried about strangers knowing who I am. But as I began to blog more I worried that someone would stumble across my blog and reveal my identity to my friends and family.

With that decision, and the knowledge of the SDAT records, (which my husband queries for our homeowners association), the beach house link went off the blog!

I sooooo appreciate your honesty! I hadn't expected that as a response to this post!