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April 7, 2008

Foreclosures Shown On Scary, Encroaching Heat Maps

Erick Schonfeld

32 comments »

hotpads-logo.png

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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CrunchBase Information
HotPads
Information provided by CrunchBase
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This entry was posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 2:49 pm and is filed under Web 2.0 News & Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Trackbacks/Pings (Trackback URL)

  1. Foreclosure Heat Map for Walnut Creek Area « Walnut Creek Real Estate

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:40 pm

  2. Mashups come of age? Showing foreclosures as they encircle the Capitals? | TechAgility

    April 7th, 2008 at 6:02 pm

  3. Foreclosures a Hot Trend on Real Estate Sites « Screenwerk

    April 8th, 2008 at 6:49 am

  4. Oliver News » Blog Archive » Hotpads adds foreclosure heat maps

    April 9th, 2008 at 4:30 am

  5. Tribeca Foreclosures | Tribeca Property

    April 9th, 2008 at 8:36 am

Comments

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  1. Abdullah Anwar

    April 7th, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    This credit crisis is a huge mess. Well, this website is great. They can really make a great business out of it.

  2. bob cobb

    April 7th, 2008 at 2:57 pm

    And even after it’s all over I still won’t be able to afford anything in northern california :(

  3. Aaron Sperling

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:00 pm

    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.

  4. RONLG

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    How disturbing.

  5. Roy

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

    You’re not looking far enough north.

  6. ClintJCL

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:08 pm

    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.

  7. ClintJCL

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    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.

  8. Melanie

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:16 pm

    “RealtyTrac” or “RealityTrac [sic]”? A telling slip!

  9. Todd

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    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.

  10. chris (trade2save.com)

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:27 pm

    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?

  11. michael

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:37 pm

    Yet another listing service making money on ad sales. Why?

  12. RedMol.com

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:54 pm

    Woohoo! Time for real estate investors to come and clean things up.

  13. matt

    April 7th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    @11 - because you can mash up anything nowadays

  14. AJ Kohn

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    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.

  15. Joshua Konkle

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    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

  16. Peter Urban

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:31 pm

    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.

  17. antje wilsch

    April 7th, 2008 at 4:44 pm

    whoa - shows my old house in the east bay as in foreclosure and worth about $300k less than when I left a year ago…

  18. Rick Droz

    April 7th, 2008 at 6:16 pm

    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!!!!!!!!!!!!

  19. Michael Bakovic

    April 7th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

    Its insane how many houses are on foreclosure these days…

    Please check out my blog for ways to make money online
    http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com

  20. Lilo

    April 7th, 2008 at 8:09 pm

    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.

  21. Hoodeo

    April 7th, 2008 at 8:35 pm

    Great interface! However, you have to register with Realtytrac to see the full address and detail.

  22. theFrontSteps

    April 7th, 2008 at 9:31 pm

    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.

  23. Amde

    April 7th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    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,

  24. Rick

    April 8th, 2008 at 8:03 am

    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.

  25. Adrian

    April 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm

    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.

  26. Sean

    April 8th, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    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.

  27. Arnie

    April 9th, 2008 at 7:51 am

    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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