written by Will Johnson, wjhonson@aol.com, 2009
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
I am a computer programmer and web designer specializing in Real Estate work. Contact me if you have any questions or requests.
Seb Frey with the company Santa Cruz Home Broker writes a monthly (or bi-monthly) newsletter about the Santa Cruz County, California Real Estate market. You can read his latest version by clicking this link, or at this link.
I accidentally fell upon a site that I'd not seen before called RealtyBaron.com. It is similar to other sites that let you search for properties but with one interesting exception. I'd never before seen a site that lists pre-foreclosures and notices of default mixed in with the other for-sale listings. It does not give you the full address of those places, just the street, but sometimes that's enough to get a good feel for the general health of that market. One caveat about those prices; the pre-foreclosure and notice of default prices are actually just what the lender is claiming is owed to them. This is not the same as what a sale price would be, which in general should be at least a bit higher, and in some cases significantly higher if the mortgage is old, or a second mortgage or equity loan. As of Sep 2010, per RealtyBaron, there are 755 homes listed in Aptos 95003 with a median listing price of $579.
Trulia is an online real estate search service, which in addition to providing For Sale listings, allows you to view the Recently Sold listings as well. The URL link to those sold listings, for example, for zip code 95003 is http://www.trulia.com/sold/95003_zip/ As you can see, you can simply replace the 95003 with your zip code to build your own custom URL and keep that as a favorite or something. I'm glad some site has finally seen the light of good marketing. Make it hard to navigate your site and people won't use it. Make it easy and people will. That's it!
The Santa Cruz County Tax Assessor's online database can be accessed at this link, which will tell you when a place last sold and what the assessment currently is on it. You can, use this database, knowing only a street address, to find the Parcel Number. You will notice this page claims that : "California State Government Code Section 6254.21 prohibits the Assessor from providing ownership information via the Internet." This of course is an outrageous lie. That law only prohibits providing the address of an elected or appointed official, not everybody else. But the people who work for the Tax Assessor want to do the easiest thing possible, because they are lazy. So they make it seem like they have to, instead of just saying, "we're too lazy to do it any other way." It's absolutely trivial to figure out who is elected and who is not, and then maintain a list, but hey, that's the government, what do you expect?
That law of course, does not prohibit anyone else from obtaining a list of elected or appointed officials and posting their addresses on the internet. It only prohibits doing so, if you are a government body, or if you're doing it because you intend to harm that person. That law also would not prohibit a person, or a computer program, from combining the names and addresses from the phone book, with the addresses, parcel numbers, etc from these databases, and then posting this merged data online.
The office of the Santa Cruz County Recorder is online at the following link http://clerkrecorder.co.santa-cruz.ca.us/ where you can view actual documents related to recent land transactions, such as deeds and mortgages. To use the database of the Santa Cruz County Recorder, you must know one of the names of one of the parties on the instrument (deed, mortgage, etc). You can search the database neither by street address, nor by parcel number, you must know a parties name.
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
I am a computer programmer and web designer specializing in Real Estate work. Contact me if you have any questions or requests.
Seb Frey with the company Santa Cruz Home Broker writes a monthly (or bi-monthly) newsletter about the Santa Cruz County, California Real Estate market. You can read his latest version by clicking this link, or at this link.
I accidentally fell upon a site that I'd not seen before called RealtyBaron.com. It is similar to other sites that let you search for properties but with one interesting exception. I'd never before seen a site that lists pre-foreclosures and notices of default mixed in with the other for-sale listings. It does not give you the full address of those places, just the street, but sometimes that's enough to get a good feel for the general health of that market. One caveat about those prices; the pre-foreclosure and notice of default prices are actually just what the lender is claiming is owed to them. This is not the same as what a sale price would be, which in general should be at least a bit higher, and in some cases significantly higher if the mortgage is old, or a second mortgage or equity loan. As of Sep 2010, per RealtyBaron, there are 755 homes listed in Aptos 95003 with a median listing price of $579.
Trulia is an online real estate search service, which in addition to providing For Sale listings, allows you to view the Recently Sold listings as well. The URL link to those sold listings, for example, for zip code 95003 is http://www.trulia.com/sold/95003_zip/ As you can see, you can simply replace the 95003 with your zip code to build your own custom URL and keep that as a favorite or something. I'm glad some site has finally seen the light of good marketing. Make it hard to navigate your site and people won't use it. Make it easy and people will. That's it!
The Santa Cruz County Tax Assessor's online database can be accessed at this link, which will tell you when a place last sold and what the assessment currently is on it. You can, use this database, knowing only a street address, to find the Parcel Number. You will notice this page claims that : "California State Government Code Section 6254.21 prohibits the Assessor from providing ownership information via the Internet." This of course is an outrageous lie. That law only prohibits providing the address of an elected or appointed official, not everybody else. But the people who work for the Tax Assessor want to do the easiest thing possible, because they are lazy. So they make it seem like they have to, instead of just saying, "we're too lazy to do it any other way." It's absolutely trivial to figure out who is elected and who is not, and then maintain a list, but hey, that's the government, what do you expect?
That law of course, does not prohibit anyone else from obtaining a list of elected or appointed officials and posting their addresses on the internet. It only prohibits doing so, if you are a government body, or if you're doing it because you intend to harm that person. That law also would not prohibit a person, or a computer program, from combining the names and addresses from the phone book, with the addresses, parcel numbers, etc from these databases, and then posting this merged data online.
The office of the Santa Cruz County Recorder is online at the following link http://clerkrecorder.co.santa-cruz.ca.us/ where you can view actual documents related to recent land transactions, such as deeds and mortgages. To use the database of the Santa Cruz County Recorder, you must know one of the names of one of the parties on the instrument (deed, mortgage, etc). You can search the database neither by street address, nor by parcel number, you must know a parties name.
very interesting.
This is very interesting. The last part, about people and computer programs combining data to give out names with addresses? That part scares me a little bit. Isn't there a privacy law somewhere about that? But it would make for interesting trends in the real estate market. http://www.steamboatsprings-realestate.com
Ginny Crandall - 19 Dec 2010Privacy laws cover what's actually private. If your name and address is in the phone book, that's not private. And if that same address is listed in the public records of the county, telling how much you paid for your house, or what you pay in taxes, that's not private either.
Will Johnson - 19 Dec 2010