If you want to see in stark colors exactly how the mortgage credit crisis is spreading across the country, go to real estate search site HotPads and look at the foreclosure heat maps in your area. These are map mashups that take foreclosure data from RealtyTrac and overlay them on a color-coded map. Red indicates a high rate of property foreclosures per capita, and blue indicates a low level. Since foreclosures are now hitting record rates, there is a lot of red on these maps. In Silicon Valley, for instance, only a few pockets like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale remain in the blue. A view of New York City shows the foreclosures beginning to close in on Manhattan from the outer boroughs.
In addition to the 500,000 foreclosures you can find on HotPads, the site also lists 1.2 million homes for sale and 130,000 active rentals (which co-founder Douglas Pope claims is the second-largest rental listings after Craigslist). These are culled from real estate broker sites and submitted directly by property owners.
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This credit crisis is a huge mess. Well, this website is great. They can really make a great business out of it.
And even after it’s all over I still won’t be able to afford anything in northern california
Owners and Property Management Firms are also submitting their available units through vflyer.com. I would also mention that Hotpads was initially focused on Rentals. Since late last year, they have been aggregating and providing a terrific search engine for For Sale Property.
How disturbing.
You’re not looking far enough north.
This doesn’t show foreclosures! It just shows median incomes and such! The foreclosure tab doesn’t actually change the functionality. Those red houses are units for sale, not houses being foreclosed.
This is bad journalism.
Actually, it might not be bad journalism, but perhaps they disabled the foreclosure fucntionality.
If I click that tab, and go to narrow search, the dropped down “foreclosure rate” shown in the PNG posted here DOES NOT EXIST.
“RealtyTrac” or “RealityTrac [sic]“? A telling slip!
The website is currently showing my property as being in foreclosure. I had the property for listed for three months last summer but subsequently took the listing down when I reconciled with my wife. I have lived in the property for over five years and have never missed a mortgage payment. There is either something wrong with the data or hotpad.com has some important information I am not privy to.
Regardless, I like the map albeit it was very slow to load.
Yup, I’ve been playing around with it too - Sales and Foreclosures gives the same result - perhaps we are pressing the wrong button? Nice piece of software though. Perhaps they could also shade it for Homicides too?
Yet another listing service making money on ad sales. Why?
Woohoo! Time for real estate investors to come and clean things up.
@11 - because you can mash up anything nowadays
The foreclosure feature doesn’t seem to work in Firefox which is a shame. Kudos to Melanie on seeing the typo. Whether RealtyTrac data is accurate is a whole other discussion but I think it works as a consistent benchmark and makes it clear that the housing ‘crisis’ is pretty widespread.
I use Firefox
The system seems to work fine for me, but you must click on the heatmaps option to the left, then select foreclosures to get the foreclosure per capita.
click the heat map again to reveal the legend i.e. 1 in 2500 etc. You can change it to see the average income in the area as well as rent etc.
Seems to work pretty good.
The tab’s are designed for search, not heatmaps - i guess.
neat system and almost intuitive, but the colors are weird
High forclosure == red
High income == red
I was thinking low income would be red and high would be green…
JK
I guess now it’s party time for investors with real money in the bank. They’ll never get it that cheap again. And they will be the once making the millions that every home owner and house flipper thought they were making in the hight of the bubble. It’s funny how history doesn’t teach us anything.
whoa - shows my old house in the east bay as in foreclosure and worth about $300k less than when I left a year ago…
Hey great web site!!!! it’s awesome!!! But it suck for all the people selling hey it’s their own fault they should have read the fine print a little better. But good job HotPads!!!!!!!!!!!!
Its insane how many houses are on foreclosure these days…
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Great website, was surprised at some of the areas that showed high foreclosure rates in NY, in areas where I though the incomes are really high in addition to having high real estate prices.
Great interface! However, you have to register with Realtytrac to see the full address and detail.
The maps work. The little icons for houses are either homes for sale, or homes for rent. When you click “foreclosure” or “median rent” etc., the icons remain unchanged, however the colors associated with the “heat” adjust accordingly. As for the accuracy, no idea. Here is a foreclosure list from PropertyShark.com. http://propertyshark.com/mason.....ter11.html
Feel free to compare/contrast the accuracy.
It looks like that soon Americans will start immigrating to Africa. Yes, Africa.
Africa in general is a rich continent, just doesn’t have cash. Hey, just sell your house for whatever you can get and come to Africa.
Peace,
The foreclosure feature is pretty weak. All they are doing is putting the free (non-address, usually out-of-date) info from RealtyTrac on the page. Though the FAQ and About pages claim very loudly that everything is free, in fact if you want foreclosure details, you have to go to RealtyTrac and pay.
I asked them about this and they replied that they needed to change their About pages to reflect that not everything is actually free. I guess it’s easier to just lie and apologize later…want to bet that the page still says “it’s all free” a month from now?
This site doesn’t do anything unique. TechCrunch should have done a bit more research.
To see real foreclosure listings for free have a look at this site: GotForeclosure.com
On the Top there is a place to put in the zip code and it gives you all the foreclosure listings.
The guy that runs the site is an investment consultant; he claims his clients have purchased homes at 60% of their current market valuation. It is bad; it’s real. But then again it was speculation that pumped the prices so high in the first place… we’re going back to where prices should have been - problem is those that over-borrowed are dragging everyone else’s prices down - for a time at least.
HotPads has done a really nice job showing RealtyTrac’s affiliate data for advertising on their site, but there is otherwise nothing new here versus the RealtyTrac ads on Yahoo, Trulia, etc.
Well this sure is interesting. Seems to me all it points out is the obvious - lots of homes for sale. Not sure if the foreclosure data is accurate or not, but it seems that it must not be. I say we have 2 or 3 tough years ahead of us.
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