The Dirt on the Neighbors

Updated on March 21, 2008.

BEFORE LEAVING ATLANTA for a new job in Rochester, N.Y., Kodak executive Steve Jean made plans to see a restored 19th-century mansion just outside of downtown. He knew the numbers — 4,600 square feet, five bedrooms, an alluring asking price — and he'd seen pictures of gorgeous period details like the stained-glass windows and curved wooden staircase. But Jean had dug up some deeper intelligence that was a little less flattering: The block featured kids cranking their stereos late into the night, homeless men picking through the trash and even the occasional "working girl." So maybe there was a reason it was listed for a mysteriously low $129,000.

Home buyers usually don't get details like this without some serious shoe-leather investigating. But Jean didn't even have to set foot in upstate New York to get the inside dope on this "Spectacular Queen Anne." He learned it all by logging on to Zillow.com, where would-be buyers now have a new tool for getting the dish on the neighborhood.

Always a favorite American pastime, real estate gossip is now the new frontier in online home shopping. Forget those dry, data-heavy listings of yore. Savvy surfers are discovering juicy blogs as well as interactive sites that deliver the street-level scoop that's long been trapped in the heads of brokers and neighbors. Indeed, who needs them anymore? Just tune in to the online conversation, where users spill the beans on everything from which homes are shoddily built to whose dog makes a nightly racket. In Silicon Valley, they call this "user-generated content," but for would-be home buyers it's simply the real nitty-gritty — and it threatens to shake up the home-buying process. "It adds transparency," says Jonathan Butler, founder of the Brooklyn-based blog Brownstoner. On his site, armchair experts closely parse neighborhood listings for exaggerations and omissions, and the pros have taken notice. One broker admits that the critical consensus helped pressure him to drop the asking price on one home by $400,000.

To be sure, many of these sites have yet to attract enough traffic to be consistently reliable. Truly useful content can be quickly diluted by real estate agents fishing for clients, or by so-called trolls who post deliberately false or inflammatory comments. In the case of the Rochester home, for example, someone claiming to live nearby wrote in, anonymously, to say that the area is an open-air drug market with frequent gunfire. That came as a surprise to Sarah Long, who spent three years lovingly renovating the 12-room home with her fiancé. "We have not seen the problems that person described," she huffs, noting that a pastor lives across the street with his children. But while chatter can be hurtful to the homeowner, few shoppers complain about having too much information.

In an era when Time named "You" as the person of the year, it's not surprising that virtually every real estate site is pushing user-generated content. But unlike a video of a waterskiing squirrel, these features can make you smarter. The appeal is equal parts voyeurism and market research — a chance to play real estate sleuth without spending hours driving around strange neighborhoods. Some 84 percent of home buyers already use the Internet extensively during their search, according to the National Association of Realtors. But a growing number now want to move beyond basic listings and school-district info, to tap into insider stuff on quality-of-life issues — tips like a recent Brownstoner post that points out that a seemingly charming old church near one listing becomes a headache every Sunday when triple-parking parishioners block the streets. And over the past few years, web entrepreneurs have rolled out a slew of sites to meet that demand, with offerings ranging from neighborhood news sites like Yelp and Outside.in to real estate e-businesses like Zillow and Trulia.

The common thread among all these sites is a reliance on the so-called wisdom of crowds, which holds that a bunch of nobodies can collectively make good decisions more reliably than one or two experts. And some of these online crowds have assembled almost by accident. When New York City freelance writer Lockhart Steele launched the blog Curbed in 2004, he let readers add their comments almost as an afterthought — and tapped into a bottomless pit of knowledge and opinion. Fast-forward three years, and Curbed is now a network of eight sites, with a staff of 20 and a legion of readers gossiping about everything from dubious developers to neighbors who walk by the windows au naturel. In the site's Los Angeles section, you'll find a vigorous debate over whether a two-bedroom home in Franklin Hills is a bargain or a rip-off at $1.3 million, as well as a warning about a noisy restaurant on the drawing board. A few clicks away, other chatterers swap news about light-rail lines and share data they've dug up from City Hall planning documents — in short, collaborating to play the role of the World's Best Real Estate Agent.

For Scott Matter, that kind of research paid off when he was zeroing in on buying a high-rise condo in Manhattan. Brokers and developers alike assured him that local zoning rules would protect the building's panoramic views. But Matter later learned, on Curbed, about other construction projects that could wipe out his million-dollar vista. Matter walked away from that deal, and he says that online sleuthing changed the whole dynamic of his house-hunting from then on. Similarly, Steve Jean, the executive relocating to Rochester, says he couldn't understand why houses fronting Lake Ontario weren't selling at a premium. Every real estate agent he saw said the prices simply reflected the city's low property values. But from web research, he got the real skinny: Winds off the lake made that area almost unbearably cold for much of the year. "At least I get an honest opinion from a real person" online, he says.