Online House Hunter: Spying on your neighbour

Check out your neighbouring properties online

THERE’S always been something voyeuristic about viewing the houses for sale in your neighbourhood. Even in the days of black and white photographs in the local paper, who could resist seeing what Mrs Jones was asking for her two-bedroom terrace or what Mr Smith’s bathroom looked like?

Such human cravings have driven the popularity of programmes such as Through The Keyhole although we’d always justify it as a practical or business need rather than personal gratification. After all, we want to know whether the value of property in our locality is going up or down in price.

In today’s internet age, our curtain-twitching desire is fed not just with photographs but video and more background information than you could dream about. The Independent’s online search engine offers street views, satellite views, map views, photos and other online property search engines battle it out to provide everything from detailed floor plans to video guided-tours.

In the past, finding out how much a property sold for in your neighbourhood required blagging on a level seen only among certain rogue journalists. But today, most property websites offer detailed listings of which house sold for what price going back over the last ten years.

The Land Registry offers authoritative data on specific houses for a small fee but tap your postcode into any number of property websites – such as upmystreet.com or houseprices.co.uk – and you’ll see how much a two-bedroom terrarce sold for in your street or what a five-bedroom detached house sold for round the corner.

Such information can help you when you’re looking to sell your home or to check out the prices in the neighbourhood you wish to move to. But it needs treating with some caution. The house may have sold cheaply because it needed some serious work doing to it. Or it may have sold at a good price because the buyer saw potential for development.

But you may just be satisfying that strangely human desire to spy on the property details of your neighbours’ houses. In which case, start twitching those digital curtains!

USEFUL LINKS:

• Independent property search engine
• Independent House and Home section
• Property area guides
• Communities and Local Government: Housing research
• DirectGov: Property values and valuations
• Land Registry House Prices

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• Online_Estate_Agents

  Apparently people are becoming addicted to property websites – its become known as property porn!

• Guest

  Why shall we spy on our neighbours?
   Those who do it must have a really boring life

• http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Firozali A.Mulla

  Ldies men ladies do these mostly .

• http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Firozali A.Mulla

  Every immigration wave to the U.S. since 1900 has led to recession or depression. The late 1998-2000 wave was the biggest in U.S. history – bigger than the one from 1906-1920. Historical facts do not lie. Here is the history of immigration and recession to America since 1900:1906-1920 – Huge wave from Europe – Great Depression in 1929.1965 – Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Reform Act – Big recession 1973-19811990 – H-1B started – recession 1991-1993Oct. 1998 – H-1B caps raised form 65,000 to 115,000 per year – collapse in 2001.Apri 2000 – H-1B caps raised from 115,000 per year to 195,000 per year – collapse in 2008.The fake “recovery” in the mid 2000’s was no recovery – just cheap Fed credit making up for Americans losing their jobs.America was built by Americans. Every buildup leads to immigrant takers who come in when times are good, strip the economy, then leave when times are bad – as they are now.84% of the current U.S. population was born here. Do you seriously expect us to believe that 84% of the natives live off the work of the other 16% immigrants? Come on, stop being either a liar or delusional. Immigration is a disaster for America.China and India don’t have open borders. Did I mention they are booming.Free Trade caused WW2 – America in the 1920s sold its scrap steel to Japan and England’s Rolls Royce sold aircraft engines and factories to Hitler. We all know how that turned out. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla DBA

• Guest

  I think you can´t say that most ladies spy on their neighbors.
  Beacuse I know many men are interesting of what their neighnors do

• http://www.yahoo.co.uk/ Firozali A.Mulla

  I am one amongst many, who have yet to forgive you for your role in sweeping away Glass-Steagall and hindering the regulation of derivatives – both actions that contributed, in no small measure, to the melt-down of the US financial system – taking the rest of the world with it.After this event, to now hear you lecture that the biggest lesson learnt from the Financial Crisis is that Lehman’s should not have been allowed to fail and that no big financial institution, in any country, should be allowed to fail, in the future, is laughable. This presumably is some disengenous interpretation of the unregulated, free market that you are looking for and which Wall St is delighted to hear you trumpet.We know these policies haven’t worked, they spawned the financial crisis and it is a tragedy that you actually represent a serious political and economic lobby.As for the current debt crisis, this is merely deciding who is going to pick up the tab for your failed policies. You clearly have a view which pretends that there is a free lunch to be had, but that is dishonest. What you are proposing is that the reckless and profligate should be propped up by those that have been cautious and sober minded, worse you would like to do this by inflating away wealth and destroying the savings base of countries in the process, because “no big financial institution can be allowed to fail”.It is time you and your kind stopped trying to skew the financial markets – left to their own devices there would be a painful, but far shorter clear-out of inefficient, incompetent companies and their management. Focus on how to manage this process, and you may come up with a solution, not only for Greece, but your own banking system, which is rotten at its core. I thank you Firozali A.Mulla  DBA