:: Home Finance News ::

(PRLEAP.COM) Following the trend started by housingmaps.com, floridasexualpredator.com, and chicagocrime.org, boberdoo.com announced today the launch of CostWhat.com (http://www.costwhat.com).

CostWhat.com uses a database of recent Cook County home sales along with Google’s mapping technology allowing visitors to see what their neighbors paid for their homes. In real estate terms, this is known as a CMA or comparative market analysis. The process of sending potential buyers a CMA is not new, but the way CostWhat.com delivers the CMA definitely is.

Using CostWhat.com is self explanatory and quite easy to use. It takes about 30 seconds to generate a CostWhat CMA because the system is pulling in data from the home sales database web service as well as from Google’s mapping system. Once the data is put together, CostWhat’s CMA lists the ten most recent home sales nearest the address the user submitted.

Pushpins are marked on the map section of the CostWhat CMA and when a user clicks on one of the pushpins, a popup window lists the property’s address, sale date and sale price. The home sales database varies from region to region within Chicago, but many include not only address and price, but also the number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and the square footage of the sold property. An example of the CostWhat CMA can be found at http://www.costwhat.com/example.html.

“I actually started thinking about this right after I saw the first pushpin on a Google map but it took a while to get the data provider lined up,” said Brad Seiler, owner of boberdoo.com. “All of these other great solutions like the Craiglist hack or chicagocrime.org use free data sources to populate their service. CostWhat.com is a little different in that we are paying for the recent home sales database and merging that information with the Google map.

The information is valuable to anyone interested in their current home value regardless of the map, but the map definitely makes the system unique and eye catching. Many people do not wish to be nagged by a realtor which unfortunately has been the only good way to see CMA information. CostWhat.com now gives those people who are just curious an opportunity to see recent home sales information within Cook County.”

CostWhat.com is currently only available within Cook County because the data is quite expensive but Seiler is hopeful that enough advertising revenue will come in so he can expand to the rest of Chicagoland and then the rest of the US.