The mother of three was looking for a house in the southwest suburbs. A friend of hers recommended Orland Park. Determined to make sure that this growing suburb would be a good home for her children, the woman logged on to the Internet.
By finding the Web site of the village, www.orland-park.il.us, the woman found that Orland Park’s recreation department featured activities for children ranging from preschoolers to teens. She discovered that the village’s recreation center hosted dance classes, perfect for her fifth-grade daughter, and that her 14-year-old son could hang out after school in the center’s teen game room. She even learned that the village ran a skate park, perfect for her 10-year-old son.
Next, the woman logged onto www.theschoolreport.com, a Web site devoted to providing free school information. Here, she found that Orland Park Elementary School District 135 allows students to study a foreign language, sing in a choir or play in a band. She also discovered that the district’s elementary schools house their own computer labs.
This sold the woman, and she decided to look in Orland Park for her new home. Only one problem remained. What real estate agent should she choose?
The woman again turned to the Internet, logging on to the Web site of the South/Southwest Association of Realtors, a trade group of real estate agents that serve the cities of Chicago’s South and Southwest sides. Here she found the names, addresses and, where available, Web pages of Orland Park-area real estate agents.
The above scenario, a hypothetical one, isn’t unusual. The Internet is quickly becoming an invaluable tool for Chicago-area house hunters.
Many house hunters, of course, still start their search for a dream home in the backseat of their real estate agent’s car. Their agents drive them through the neighborhoods that interest them, pointing out churches, schools, parks and home styles as they drive down quiet side streets and busy main roads.
The goal is to narrow down these house hunters’ lists of desired neighborhoods, whittling the communities that interest them down to a manageable few.
This isn’t the quickest process. In fact, it often takes days of driving.
Today, though, there’s an easier way for home shoppers to research neighborhoods: the Internet.
The Internet is home to a wealth of neighborhood information. Home shoppers can find information on everything from churches in Lincoln Park to schools in Arlington Heights.
“The Internet has made the real estate agent’s job much easier,” said Honore Frumentino, a real estate agent with the Deerfield office of GMAC Koenig & Strey Real Estate. “By the time they see us, many consumers have zeroed in on what communities they want to look at. Before, we’d spend the first entire day touring towns. Now, we can eliminate that step.”
About 30 percent of Frumentino’s clients use the Internet to perform preliminary research on the neighborhoods that interest them, the agent said. Those house hunters that don’t do this, that ignore the Internet, are costing themselves plenty of information.
Most of the suburbs surrounding Chicago run their own Web sites.
These sites provide information on local schools, park-district programs and community festivals. The City of Chicago runs its own extensive Web site, www.ci.chi.il.us, where visitors can learn about upcoming city festivals, find information on Chicago public schools, link to the Web site of the City Colleges of Chicago and uncover a list of vacant land for sale by the city.
Local chambers of commerce, including the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, www.chicagolandchamber.org, run their own Web sites. These, too, contain valuable information about a community’s business health and shopping districts. And house hunters shouldn’t forget to check the Web sites of a community’s school districts, park districts and police departments.
“People are so much more educated now when they first come to us,” said Marco Amidei, broker associate at Re/Max Suburban in Libertyville. “They can go right on the Internet to learn so much about a neighborhood. They can find out about everything now–schools, places of worship, there are even Web sites for individual subdivisions. We get some people who come to us with a stack of papers they’ve printed out from the Internet.”
There’s so much information out there, in fact, it’s difficult to know where to start. But real estate pros have their own favorite Web sites. House hunters looking for neighborhood information on the Web would do well to log on to some of these when starting their research.
One of the best places to start researching a neighborhood is at Homefair.com ( www.homefair.com). This commercial site, which has existed since 1994 and is supported by advertising dollars, provides comprehensive city reports free of charge. Home shoppers can find out a municipality’s population, average household income, unemployment rate, cost of living and major employers. The reports also include information on property tax rates, average house prices and apartment rents.
Bryan Schutjer, president of Homefair.com, said that the Web site receives 700,000 to 900,000 unique visits every month. The most popular feature, he said, is the site’s salary calculator.
This feature calculates how far someone’s money goes in a given community when compared to another municipality. For instance, if a person receives a job offer in New York that pays $10,000 more a year than does his current job in Milwaukee, the salary calculator will explain just how little $10,000 extra counts for in Manhattan.
“Early in my career, I got a promotion that took me from Dallas to Chicago,” Schutjer said. “I moved downtown with my 20 percent raise. After a while, I was wondering where all that extra money went.”
House hunters can also find a wealth of neighborhood information at www.monsterdaata.com. The in-depth reports generated here include information on everything from a town’s crime rates to the number of high school graduating seniors moving on to college. Unfortunately, these reports aren’t free. A school profile report or environmental conditions report costs $4.95 each. A large neighborhood profile report costs $9.95.
Then there’s The School Report, found at www.theschoolreport.com. The site, as its name suggests, provides loads of information regarding schools across the nation. The free report gives house hunters information on a school district’s total population, student/teacher ratio, awards, average years of experience its teachers have, class sizes and the number of students who go on to four-year colleges. This site is part of the Homefair.com site.
Of course, these sites are just the beginning. For more local information, buyers can click on to the Web site of Living in Greater Chicago, www.greaterchicago.com. This site provides information on Chicago and its suburbs. For instance, buyers seeking information about Alsip, can find the municipality’s city hall phone number, school information, average home prices, average monthly apartment rent, major employers and recreation opportunities.
On a recent visit, the site reported that Alsip’s public library held more than 102,000 volumes and that the city features a nine-hole public golf course.
Home shoppers should also make sure to visit the Web sites of the cities or towns that interest them. Chicago and most of its suburbs now run their own sites.
Five of the six counties that make up the Chicago area also feature their own Web sites, which are also stocked with important neighborhood information: Cook County’s site can be found at www.co.cook..il.us; Lake County’s at www.co.lake.il.us; DuPage County’s at www.co.dupage.il.us; Kane County’s at www.kane.il.us ; McHenry County’s at www.co.mchenry.il.us; and Will County’s at www.c-e-d.org. Kendall County does not yet run its own Web site.
Finally, home shoppers can simply log on to their favorite search engines and type in the name of the community or neighborhood that interests them.
A search is bound to turn up some interesting Web sites.
For example, a search for “Hyde Park, Chicago” turned up the Web sites for the United Church of Hyde Park ( www.gbgm-umc.org/uchydepark) and the extensive community information site for the Hyde Park/Kenwood neighborhoods, www.hydepark.org.
A search for “Lincoln Park, Chicago” found the Web homes for the Lincoln Park Zoo, www.lpzoo.com; Lincoln Park Boat Club, www.lpbc.net; Lincoln Park Athletic Club, www.lpaconline.com; and Lincoln Park Presbyterian Church, www.suba.com/(tilde)lppc/.
Even with the long list of resources available on the Internet, many home shoppers are not taking advantage of the research opportunities it provides.
“Not a lot of my customers are using it,” said Michael Marroquin, a real estate agent with Re/Max Central in Roselle. “Maybe 20 percent or so are actually using it. Why is that number so low? That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer for it, though.”
Those customers that ignore the Web, though, risk making the process of searching for their dream home more difficult than it has to be.
NEIGHBORHOOD SITES AT A GLANCE
Although it is filled with information, the Internet is still a tricky place to navigate. Finding the information you need is sometimes a challenge.
But house hunters can break useful Internet sites into several categories:
– Home pages of area real estate agents. These sites usually give basic information about a certain real estate agent–qualifications, years in business, areas of specialization. The sites also show the listings these agents represent. Be warned, though, that most agents will only show their listings on their sites. Those who rely solely on individual real estate agents’ sites for home listings will miss many potential dream homes.
– Home pages of cities, towns and villages. These sites are often primitive, with crude graphics and slow loading times. But don’t ignore them. They often contain a wealth of information about the towns that interest you. These sites typically include the names and numbers of a municipality’s public officials; the phone numbers and addresses of the local police and fire stations; the location of parks, schools and recreational centers; information about public meetings, events and festivals; and links to a community’s chamber of commerce, school district and park department.
– General commercial sites. These sites, such as bancodeprofissionais.com/homes, offer information on a variety of topics. Some list school data, compiling the ACT scores and graduation rates of local high schools. Others list crime data, showing how much crime each town suffers. Some provide reports on municipalities’ economic health, compiling the average median income of residents or the town’s property tax rate.
– Commercial real estate sites. These sites, such as Realtor.com (www.realtor.com) and Cyberhomes (www.cyberhomes.com), provide house listings for municipalities across the country, including Chicago and its suburbs. Any house that shows up on the Multiple Listing Service can be found on sites such as these. These sites also provide mortgage calculators that let visitors compute how much home they can afford, what their monthly mortgage payments would be and for how large a home loan they qualify.
— Dan Rafter
