Looking for on-line data

Tim wrote to me and to Scott looking for a good on-line source. I don’t know where to find what he’s looking for, but I thought maybe someone in the blog readership did. So, can you help Tim?

I am currently looking to purchase a home in central Mass and I was wondering if you know of an interactive map that shows the change in home value over the past year. I saw the map on boston.com/homes that is color coded with percentage change but it does not let you select the town and I was just wondering if you know of anything that will let you pick individual towns.

So, please help Tim find a one-step place to find the average percentage changes for towns in Central Mass. The software on this blog will bounce anything with a full URL into the junk folder. I promise to go in daily to retrieve your suggestions.

IMHO, knowing the average percentage change of a town is not going to help Tim know what to pay for any specific house. I still depend on pricing each house against other houses like it, which sold recently. The market trend by town becomes a factor only when I can’t find recent enough sales. That makes older sales the comparables of last resort.

What can matter is knowing how a town is doing during a recession will give a buyer some indication of the stability of the town. Still, depending on these averages makes me antsy. Let’s face it, nothing is recession-proof. Some towns are more recession-resistant than others. Sometimes, some parts of towns are recession-resistant and others are not. Sometimes some houses are recession-resistant and while the neighborhood and town around it are not.

Do you think that knowing town averages is important? Are there other data-points that can be found on-line that are as important? What research do you think Tim should be doing?