New Web site shines light on sales in 220 neighborhoods

The newspaper has just launched a Web service called Neighborhood Watch in which you can pick through more than 100,000 home sales from the past four or five years.

The Times' computer guru Matt Waite has done a great service by categorizing home sales, updated weekly from county appraisers offices, into 186 neighborhoods in Pinellas County and 35 neighborhoods in Pasco County. We're going to organize similar data dumps for Hillsborough and Hernando counties, too.

You can choose your neighborhood from a drop down box or insert a zip code. Up pops ALMOST EVERY RECORDED SALE in the community going back to 2004 and 2005. Click on individual addresses to get details of the transaction.

Did I tell you it's free?

Those of you who distrust statistics from the Realtor associations should be happy. Unlike Realtors, we include For Sale By Owner deals, new home sales not sold through the Multiple Listing Service and other deals that often slip through the statistical cracks.

We also do our own math in spotting sales and price trends. Needless to say, price declines vary wildly depending on which neighborhood you flag. Playing off the Web site, I'm writing a story this weekend to highlight some of price discrepancies in neighborhoods only a couple miles away from each other.

You can click here to get started.

Comments

[Kathleen]

"Unlike Realtors, we include For Sale By Owner deals, new home sales not sold through the Multiple Listing Service and other deals that often slip through the statistical cracks."

This statement is highly incorrect. REALTORS "do" have access to For Sale By Owner properties, whether they are activ on the market, under contract, or just sold,... and "do" use them in comparables.

Readers, do not be misled, the website being offered is not a "new" concept. It's public information that has always been accessible.

[Tony]

Easy to use; and it's nice to have the ability to subscribe to your neigborhoods to get updates. thanks.

[James Thorner]

Let me clarify for the sake of Kathleen. When the public gets the monthly statisitics from the Florida Association of Realtors, for sale by owner transactions aren't always counted. I'm sure such numbers are available to dues paying Realtors, but the public has a hard time accessing them. Our new Web site uses public information. No one's arguing with that. What's unique is the way we've packaged it. It's a free service. What's that they say about a gift horse?

[Tino]

realtors may have access to FSBO information, but they choose to ignore them if they are a threat to their inflated asking prices and/or don't pay a juicy commission to buyer's agents.

Go ahead, call your local-yokel realtor and ask for a list of FSBOs in your area. You will hear either a laugh or a dial tone.

[Tino]

James, great site. A few small error messages here and there, but I like it.

[Matt Waite]

Tino -- the error messages should go away if they haven't already. We had a gremlin a little while ago that was kicking off errors here and there. We've since fixed the problem and things should behave themselves now. If not, drop an email to watch@sptimes.com and cut and paste the error for me, would you?

Matt Waite
News Technologist
St. Petersburg Times | Tampabay.com

[Linda]

This is a great site, it simplifies the data that I have been trying to compile for myself. HOWEVER, it does not appear to include sales on Isla Del Sol. Am I missing it??

[Linda]

This is a great site, but it doesn't appear to include date from Isla Del Sol, which is sandwiched between Tierra Verdi and St. Pete Beach

[Matt Waite]

Linda:

This version just deals with single family homes. Isla Del Sol, if memory serves, is all condos and town homes. We're planning on doing a separate version for condos and other types of housing, so stay tuned. We have Isla Del Sol in our neighborhood database and will definitely include it in the condo version.

Matt Waite
News Technologist
St. Petersburg Times | Tampabay.com

[Alex]

Matt, great work. I may have overlooked this, but it doesn't seem to break down sales by number of beds/baths or sq ft. Would it be possible to add that in as a feature later on?

Also, where does your data come from? Did you compile your own database? Or does it pull data directly from county websites?

[Matt Waite]

Alex: You didn't overlook it because it's not there. I'm trying to work on a solution to this, but the problem comes down to each property appraiser doing business just a bit different. Pinellas, for instance, doesn't report the number of baths in a house. What they report is the number of "fixtures," which is equivalent to holes in the concrete slab. So a house with 3 fixtures is probably a 1 bath house (a tub, a toilet and a sink). Five fixtures is one and a half and so on. The problem is in more modern luxury homes, one bath could have four or five fixtures: dual vanities, a shower and a tub plus a toilet. So just taking the number of fixtures and dividing by three doesn't give you an always accurate number of baths. Few appraisers record bedrooms, because one man's bedroom is another man's den or office. There's no way to know, house to house, owner to owner, which ones are bedrooms and which ones are something else.

As for square footage, all property appraisers do record square footage, but they have to rely on people being honest about when they add onto their house. And there's often a lag between when a house is torn down and rebuilt and when the property appraiser's offices record the change. In an early beta, I found a house on the beach that sold for $6 million and was only 2,000 square feet. Impossible, I thought. So I looked at the satellite view and you could see that the house had been rebuilt recently into something that had 2,000 square feet in the garage alone. So, at least for this first iteration, I'm leaving square feet alone. You aren't the first one to ask -- Jim Thorner has been asking about it since day 1 -- so I'm going to try and do something for version 2.

And yes, all this information comes from the property appraisers offices. They post sales databases weekly and that's what we use.

Matt Waite
News Technologist
St. Petersburg Times | Tampabay.com

[billo]

Thanks for a terrific NEW source of information. I think anyone looking to
buy a house in a neighborhood should go to your page first !

I see that you're going to add condos
soon. Please do ! Not much else on Clearwater Beach, for example.

Could you also make it an option to look at an entire ZIP code, not just neighborhoods within the ZIP code ?
Again, this would be very helpful for Clearwater Beach...to see sales trends, for example.

Again, CONGRATULATIONS !

[L. Anderson]

What happened to Spring Lake. We are 171 homes and you don't even list it as a neighborhood. I would like statistics on my neighborhood. Thanks

[Chris Giuliana]

This is a fine service because it is so easily presented, and gives a few years to look at. Thanks!
I wonder if a similar set of date exists to show the progress of foreclosures. The relative extent of foreclosures among local govenments is a major factor in calculating the amount of federal grants going to cities for the acquistion and restoration of foreclosed and abandoned homes under Public Law 110-289. There is good reason to believe that $74.5 million overall will be coming to the Tampa/St.Pete/Clearwater SMSA. Those funds can really help some hard hit neigborhoods recover.

[Oscar]

Very impressive! I found most telling in comparing Pasco to Pinellas was since the peak of June, 2006 Pinellas dropped 10% (from $213K to 192K), but Pasco dropped 40% (from $240K to 145K).

A lot of Pasco's sales were in newer subdivisions; I guess it pays to buy in established neighborhoods.

Are the bar charts with median prices by County available by neighborhood?

[Fuzzy Bear]

James and Matt:

Excellent job on the web site as it does provide the consumer an unbiased look at the local realestate market without the influence of special interest groups or the lack of inclusion of important data such as FSBO.

Your site is a must for the consumer to use to make an educated decision when purchasing a property.

[Sailor]

Great new site with many good features. May I recommend that you add the capabilities to search on year to year avg sales price and avg per sqft cost. That would provide us the capability to better measure the appraisers assessment from year to year. It appears the recent assessments are way high compared with reported declines in prices. I believe the appeaiser banks on the average homeowner lack of access to actually compare home sales prices. Your site would provide this to us if you add these features. therefore I forsee a avalanche in petitions being filed.

[David]

Thanks for the additional resource for us who plan on buying in the next year or two. It will help me a lot when you get the condo and townhouse site going.

[Matt Waite]

Lots of great comments and suggestions. Thanks all for checking it out.

Billo: I experimented with zip codes but chose to focus on neighborhoods because I thought people would want to see places closest to them. I'm still adding features, so I'll add zip codes to the list of feature requests.

L. Anderson: We corresponded via email but for anyone else here, Spring Lake is in the neighborhood we call North Central Clearwater. We don't have every single neighborhood in the area -- no one does -- but we do cover most every area, especially in Pinellas. Sometimes it's a very specific neighborhood name, sometimes it's a more generic area name. If you don't see your neighborhood at first, don't give up. It's probably part of a larger area. We're working on adding more neighborhoods all the time, so stay tuned.

Chris: I wish. I really do. Foreclosure data is often messy and not readily accessible. If that ever changes, bank on me doing something with it.

Oscar: Each neighborhood has bar charts. Pick a neighborhood and scroll down under the map, under the story, under the table and you'll see them.

Sailor: I think I got an email from you, but for the rest; I'm working on pages that will let you do custom comparisons. I'm also working on the price per square foot issue. Stay tuned.

Matt Waite
News Technologist
St. Petersburg Times | Tampabay.com

[Sharon Simms]

Great job, Matt, and a wonderful asset. Glad you'll be adding condos. There are a few map errors, and I hope readers will send corrections that they see so that the site will be even better.

[mike]

Great addition to the already good site of the Times. Any chance of adding the Village Of Woodland Hills subdivision to the list?
Keep up the great work!

[steve]

Is this some type of support group for Fl homeowners???.....Wake up girls and guys.. the party is over, its 4 in the morning, you're still drunk and you have to be at work at 8. Spin the numbers anyway you want, but the reality is, the house of cards has begun falling and hasn't even hit the floor. Just because we "want" bad things to "just go away", doesn't mean they will.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Matt and James:

The only suggestions I have is to add in the foreclosures as they have a significant impact on home prices in any given subdivision. I would also add the sqft of the properties mentioned so the users can determine the price per sqft from the sales price.

Do include Hillsborough county as this county has an overall impact to the Tampa Bay area RE numbers.

Your site is much more reliable than the MLS listings which is often manipulated.

[Fuzzy Bear]

Chris: I wish. I really do. Foreclosure data is often messy and not readily accessible.

Pull the data from the county clerks foreclosure filings and sort accordingly. The data is much more reliable.

[Tino]

steve, you hit the nail on the head.

There is a waterfront house that I have been watching. The bank was owed $1.2 million on the note at foreclosure, and the property was "appraised" at $1.5 million.

It put it on the market at $850k and gradually lowered the price to $741k. No takers. It is now auctioning it off with a starting bid of $339k.

A local-yokel realtor told me that an empty lot on the same block is worth "well over a million". Someone's wrong, and I don't think it's the buyers!

[Fuzzy Bear]

I don't think it's the buyers!

You would be correct Tino. The following are from an article I read this morning:

"Analysts at Credit Suisse estimate that the S&P Case-Shiller Index of house prices in 20 major cities must fall by another 14 percent for houses to become affordable again, assuming the typical mortgage rate stays around 6.32 percent.
The index was down 15.8 percent from a year earlier in May.
If borrowing costs eased to 5.5 percent, the Case-Shiller index may have only another 7 percent to fall, Credit Suisse said, but if rates rise to 7.5 percent, house prices may tumble another 24 percent.
It is a similar story in Florida.
Real estate market analyst Jack McCabe, of McCabe Research & Consulting in Deerfield Beach, Florida, said regions such as Miami, Orlando and Tampa were looking at another 15 to 20 percent drop."

[Tino]

The Case-Shiller futures contracts are even more negative -- the futures markets are expecting a 22% decrease for Miami prices between now and November 2010.

Fuzzy, I might add that those additional drops are from current SALES prices, not current ASKING prices.

In many areas, asking prices are still 50-100% higher than sales prices, so the sellers are not learning their lesson and inventories are continuing to skyrocket.

If prices drop another 20%, that would make those sellers' asking prices even more ridiculous.

My previous favorite realtor phrase/lie used to be "this house (on the market for 800 days) is seeing a lot of interest lately". My newest favorite (heard twice this past weekend on homes priced 75% higher than comps): "I believe that this house is priced fairly".

[James Thorner]

Just wanted to remind you that bank foreclosure sales appear in our data. You can usually spy them by the unusually low price relative to other homes. If you dig deeper you'll find the sellers are banks/lenders/loan servicers/etc. It's true you're seeing the foreclosures after they've been sold off, but you can be sure there are others in the same locales if you're in the market for one of these homes.

[Fuzzy Bear]

"I believe that this house is priced fairly".

I drove by one in Carrolwood Village this past weekend, 1939 sqft, asking price of $279,000!

About $90,000 or more overpriced for this old of a house. Some people just don't understand there is a major correction going on in the housing market.

[My Two Cents]

Great site, great resource and great job getting it up and perfected. I'm happy you're adding Hillsborough County, any projected dates for completion?