Online 'foreclosure' searches increase

Searching for foreclosures? You're not alone. Today from Inman News:

Hitwise, a Web metrics company, reported in its corporate blog this week that online search-engine queries including the phrase "foreclosure" have increased considerably in the past weeks.

Searches including the term "foreclosure" peaked during the week ending Feb. 2, 2008, and hit the second-highest and third-highest levels in the weeks ending Feb. 28 and March 7 of this year.

Last year's spike followed media coverage of U.S. cities with the highest rates of foreclosure, with many searches featuring the phrases "what is foreclosure" and "highest foreclosure cities."

For the four-week period ending March 7, 2009, searches for "free foreclosure listings" and "foreclosure listings" topped the list of search phrases containing "foreclosure," Hitwise reported.

Interesting that February 2008 saw the peak when 2009 prices are so much lower.

-- Lauren Beale

Thoughts? Comments?

Photo: This 3,565-square-foot foreclosure at 5605 Shenandoah Ave., in L.A.'s Ladera Heights neighborhood, has four bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. The 1959 two-story house is listed for $789,000. Credit: Nelson Shelton & Associates

Online seller tool acts as eyeballs on the Web

Here's a new tool that gathers online listing information in one spot. It's intended to show sellers how well their property is being promoted on the Web at major real estate listing sites. International Listings' Real Estate Marketing Report Card will then grade the agent on his or her performance in getting the property widely listed.

As someone checking on listings for a variety of reasons (selling not among them), I still liked the tool because it was easy to click through to the various sites (under View Your Listing) to gather information on a particular house. But users need to know full address, ZIP Code and price to use it this way.

-- Lauren Beale

Thoughts? Comments?

Layoffs at Zillow, Redfin: 'We're headed for a big dip.'

Zillow.com and Redfin.com, rapidly growing web-based real estate companies, both announced major layoffs this week amid a weakening housing market and what Zillow says could be a "prolonged recession."

Zillow, the Seattle-based website that estimates home values, said it will slash its workforce by 25% in hopes of surviving what it calls "a major economic storm."  From a blog post by Zillow CEO Rich Barton:

The unprecedented economic events that are playing out on a global stage began in our own industry and have made a prolonged recession likely, in our judgment.  We are a young company that is not yet making a profit.  Despite having sizeable cash reserves, we deemed the responsible course was to meaningfully reduce expenses, so that Zillow emerges from the other side of the recession in a very strong position, even if the recession lasts many years.

Earlier in the week, Redfin, the discount brokerage and listings website featured frequently on this blog as a source of information, announced it was laying off roughly 20% of its employees. From a blog post by Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman:

Today Redfin laid off roughly 20% of our employees.

Unlike other startups, our industry’s recession started a year ago, when home prices first plunged.

Since then, we’ve fought like starving animals, and with some success: while industry-wide transaction volumes dropped 33%, we grew revenues by nearly 50%. Traffic grew more than 300%.

Even a month ago, we were raising 2009 revenue projections. All our markets, now including Chicago, contributed profits.

But the past few weeks have seen a major reversal. As the stock market wiped out prospective down-payments, tours and offers dropped 30%. Transactions that were done came undone. October will still be pretty good, then we’re headed for a big dip.

Two cents: I'm disappointed to hear news like this. I'm a fan of the web-based real estate companies like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin. I think they provide a valuable service to nonprofessionals trying to better understand the real estate market. I hope they succeed.

Secondly, it's worth taking a step back and placing this in context: No one yet knows the true extent of the economic fallout from the collapse of the real estate and credit bubbles in this country. It's quite likely that, at Dow 14,000, we had a stock market bubble as well. What Redfin is saying is that an already weak housing market worsened dramatically in the past few weeks.

Your thoughts? Comments? E-mail story tips to Peter Viles

-- Peter Viles

Hat tips: Cal and Laker, via comments.

An outsider's neighborhood guide to Los Angeles

If you loved your old neighborhood back in New York, or Chicago, can a website help you find a similar kind of place in Los Angeles? I am doubtful, but the website Homethinking is trying to do the job.

The website uses census data to analyze demographic characteristics of a neighborhood, and to find similar neighborhoods in other cities. So if you're familiar with New York City neighborhoods, and want to find their Los Angeles demographic equivalents, you would find that:

SoHo is like: Pico/Robertson and Silver Lake;
Little Italy is like: Atwater Village and Leimert Park;
Chelsea is like: Mid City West, Los Feliz and Hollywood Hills.

Somewhat amusing, but I'm not sure there is much value there -- the "Chelsea is like" example failed to come up with West Hollywood, probably because West Hollywood is not in the city of Los Angeles. The site lists only neighborhoods in the city of L.A.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this site, which has a few other bells and whistles, and is mainly devoted to helping readers pick the right real estate agent.

-- Peter Viles

Photo: Searching for a neighborhood at the Grove shopping center. Credit: Los Angeles Times

California home buyers turn to the Web

More buyers are scanning the Internet, according to the California Assn. of Realtors' "2008 Survey of California Home Buyers," which found 78% of respondents using it as a search tool compared with 72% in 2007.

Web users or not, buyers are taking a lot more time looking at homes, the survey found, perhaps because there are now more choices. Buyers using the Internet spent an average 8.3 weeks looking, up from 5.2 in 2007, while non-Internet users spent 10.3 weeks, up from eight last year.

These non-Web buyers ended up visiting almost twice as many homes with their agents in tow -- an average of 23.3 homes, in contrast with 12.7 for the Internet-savvy.

Funny, all the advance homework didn't necessarily shorten the overall process for Internet users. They just spent more time considering homes before contacting an agent, an average of 8.2 weeks, while non-Web users spent 3.6 weeks.

-- Lauren Beale

Your thoughts? Comments?

Photo: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

Walkable neighborhoods of L.A. and Long Beach

So many promising-sounding websites fail to deliver useful information, but you can take the recommendation of Inman News that this is a "cool tool" to the bank.

Walk Score can help buyers gauge if there are stores or restaurants within walking distance of a potential home, yet the site also is educational for the homeowner not going any place, except perhaps on foot.

The results for specific address searches include accompanying maps littered with appropriate icons and make it even harder to justify popping in the car for a short jaunt in the neighborhood.

The site says it ranks 2,508 neighborhoods in 40 U.S. cities. It also scores and lists the most walkable neighborhoods.

For L.A. the top 5 were:
1. Mid-City West
2  Downtown
3  Hollywood
4  New Downtown
5  Mid Wilshire

For Long Beach:
1. Downtown
2  Belmont Shore
3  Belmont Heights
4  Bixby Knolls
5  East Side

Who says nobody walks in L.A.?

-- Lauren Beale

Your thoughts? Comments?

Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Trulia for iPhone, and other new (real estate) toys

Trulia, the San Francisco-based real estate search website, today rolled out three new Web services -- worth checking out if you are a Trulia user or someone who wants to keep up on the newest Web-based real estate toys:

--"Trulia Mobile" is a suite of new mobile products for phones and in-car navigation systems; it includes a special free application built for iPhones that detects your location and sends you nearby homes for sale, open houses, etc. Business Week has more on the new mobile products here.

--Localized news feeds that will included new listings, price trends and recently sold properties grouped by neighborhoods, and blog posts relating to those neighborhoods. Redfin recently rolled out a similar product that allows you to track activity in your neighborhood or city.

--A new, free blogging platform that will allow real estate agents to reach the Trulia audience, which Trulia estimates at 5 million home owners, buyers and real estate agents.

--Peter Viles
Your thoughts? Comments?
Photo Credit: Trulia.com

New from Redfin: Neighborhood stats, sliced and diced

The real estate website Redfin has added a local data feature that is worth checking out. It is full of neighborhood-level pricing and listing trends drawn from MLS data, the kind of stuff that levels the playing field between real estate professionals and the rest of us. Here's how Redfin describes the upgrade on its blog.

You can check out the data page for the city of Los Angeles here, but I'll also reproduce some highlights. The graph at right shows prices of single-family homes in Los Angeles expressed in dollars per square foot; the solid line is listing prices, the dotted line is sales prices.  Takeaway: As fast as listing prices are falling, sales prices are falling much faster.

Data highlights from Redfin's Los Angeles page (remember, this is just the City of L.A.):

Total homes and condos for sale: 16,859
Bank and MLS-listed foreclosures: 1,698
Median list price: $475K
Median sold price: $400K
Median days on Redfin: 85
Percentage of homes with price reductions: 43.9%
Median total reduction in price: 9.3%

You can drill down further to a smaller geographical area, picking other Southern California cities, or within cities you can choose defined neighborhoods or ZIP Codes.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this one. My inclination is to make the Los Angeles page into a weekly feature here, just running the stats you see above, as yet another way to take the pulse of the local market.

--Peter Viles

--Graphic credit: Redfin.com

How upside-down is L.A.?

The latest home value estimates from Zillow contain an interesting set of numbers on Los Angeles area homes underwater -- that is, more is owed on the mortgages than the houses are worth.

Only about 1% of L.A-area homes purchased in 2003 have negative equity, Zillow reports. But a bell curve emerges, with 24% of homes purchased in 2004 now under water. The peak year for home purchases that are now in negative equity was 2006 -- 71% of homes purchased then are now upside down. About 56% of homes purchased in 2007 are in negative equity.

The negative equity percentage falls to 13% in 2008, tied to the sharp drop in home prices. Buyers are now making median downpayments of 20% of the home purchase price, Zillow reports, up from a 10% median downpayment in 2007 and a 5% median down payment in 2006 (not surprisingly, the year resulting in the highest percentage of homes now upside down).

Currently about 40% of Los Angeles-area homes purchased in the last five years are in negative equity, Zillow said.

-- Peter Y. Hong

Campus crime stats at your fingertips

Sending your kid off to school and need something else to worry about? How about campus crime?

UCrime.com provides recent crime information on 101 colleges and universities nationwide. The maps I tested of the University of Colorado at Boulder and USC were slow to load on my computer but told me what I suspected. Students on the Colorado campus have a lot less crime to deal with than those here in L.A. The icons for different types of crime pretty well covered the map of USC.

I passed on the option to sign up for alerts on recently reported crimes. Enough already. Perhaps this is a better tool for parents whose children are still weighing what college to attend.

-- Lauren Beale, Real Estate editor

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times