Real Estate Shopping
Sharon Epperson, CNBC-TV Reporter

HOST (Mark Haines): People are on the web to find out more than what's for sale or get mortgage rates. Sharon Epperson here with more on what you can learn if you just log on in today's Your Money.

REPORTER (Sharon Epperson): Well there is a lot that you can learn. You know low mortgage rates may be enticing buyers to log on to real estate websites in record numbers but loans aren't the only information they're looking for. Buyers usually rely on real estate agents and brokers for prices of recent sales in their desired neighborhood but even those figures are just a click away. Jody DiTore saw 30 homes before she found the one she wanted to buy then when it came time to finance the deal she worried she and her husband had made too high of an offer until she checked comparable sales in the area.

JODY DITORE (Home Buyer): We saw houses right in our ballpark about a block away that were going for the same type of home for the same price.

REPORTER: Her mortgage brokers directed her to a real estate website called Domania which offers a home price check where you can find out what the seller paid for the home as well as the sales price of others homes on that street or neighborhood.

BOB MOULTON (Americana Mortgage Inc. CEO): One of the biggest concerns of first time homebuyers or clients that are trading up or empty nesters is that they make sure they are not overpaying for a house in a specific area so they do like to double check themselves.

REPORTER: Homebuyers are arming themselves for the house hunt with a lot more information these days. They're surfing the web not just for listings or mortgage calculators to help them figure out monthly payments, they're also logging on to get information about neighborhoods, school test scores as well as comparable sales. About 17 million people used a real estate website last January according to Nielsen Net Ratings.

LESLIE MARABLE (Nielsen Net Ratings): Looking at year to year that's about a 50% increase so clearly more and more people are accessing the sites.

REPORTER: Some sites such as HomeGain.com have seen online traffic rise as much as 135% in that time. Real estate investor Susan Landon often uses HomeGain to research sales history on properties she's considering buying. Though she could get the same information from the local government or real estate agent, getting it online is simply easier.

SHARON LANDON (Real Estate Investor): You certainly can get information from the county offices but that is very time consuming and a very cumbersome process. I couldn't begin to imagine how much time I would waste if I tried to obtain the information in that matter.

REPORTER: But house hunters admit there are some drawbacks to these websites.

LANDON: It may not be as complete. In some counties that I deal in I may not find the numbers of bedrooms or bathrooms listed or I may not find the square footage of a house listed and both of those are useful information.

REPORTER: Still homebuyers like Jody DiTore say being armed with any additional information you can get is often a huge asset. Now you won't find sales history online for homes in Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, Utah or Wyoming, the data is not part of the public record in those states. And in state and counties where the information is available to the public there maybe a lag time of six weeks or more before it appears on some of these websites but Mark a lot of great information there for consumers to get themselves.

HOST: Sounds fantastic. More and more the middleman gets cut out. Thank you Sharon.

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