Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

Dave the Detective

Courtney and I found another house that we like, and today we had a realtor show us the inside. It’s in Westchester, which is in the southwest part of town. There aren’t too many more houses in the city limits that could be farther away from our house now.

The house needs some work on the inside, but all of the important things are in good working order, and we can fix all of the crappy things. I think we’re going to try and take a closer look at it later in the week, sans kids this time.

But the fun part of this story is what I uncovered while searching the internet tonight for anything relating to this house or the neighborhood. I’m sure a lot of people still think the internet is a toy that’s not good for anything other than games and scantily clad college chicks, but tonight I unlocked the potential for the internet to be a powerful tool in real estate research.

On realtor.com, you can type in an address and see a bunch of prices for houses in the area that have been sold recently. It might not have much information, and the estimated value is admittedly an estimate, but it is something to go buy. It was nice to see that houses in our neighborhood are going for the amount we want to sell ours for, and houses in the area of the one we want to buy are generally going for more than the one we’re looking at. The questionable thing is that the house we’re looking at had a closing date less than a year ago and the dollar amount is significantly less than what the current owners are asking. I’m going to see if our realtor can dig up some information on this for us, but without the internet, I wouldn’t have had enough information to be suspicious.

Then I started to look up phone numbers for people on the street. I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to call a neighbor or two to see if they can shed some light on the house. It wasn’t too hard to find the phone numbers of the neighbors - whitepages.com has a feature that will let you type in a house address and will give you a name and number if available. I think I’ll give the neighbors a call on Tuesday unless you guys think that is totally unethical.

Then I started Googling the street name and zip code, and that’s how I came up with the two most interesting pieces of information. The first thing I found was a missing musical instrument report from the mid-nineties with a name and number of someone who lived across the street from the house we’re looking at. Turns out that this is a girl I went to school with, and her parents are still listed in the house across the street. Small world.

The second thing I found was a little more spooky. One of the Google results was to a discussion that was going on in some online forum, but you had to have a password to read the comments. But instead of clicking on the main link on Google, I clicked on the link to the cached version of the page. What this means is that Google will store a web page on its own servers, letting you browse the page without actually visiting the site. This is useful if a web site gets taken offline or is otherwise unavailable.

Anyway, the cached version of the website had all of the comments visible. One of the comments looked like a list of names and addresses - one of which was on the same street of the house we’re looking at. Well I looked a little closer, and I realized that this list also contained social security numbers, credit card numbers (and expiration dates), bank account and routing numbers, PayPal logins and passwords and so on. It was basically an entire database of stolen identities that was made public in this forum.

I double-checked this guy’s name in the list with his white pages entry, and I think it’s all legit information. It’s too late tonight, but tomorrow I’ll give him a call to let him know what’s going on. That should be a fun conversation.

Ok, time for bed. I’ll keep everybody up-to-date on the new house goings-on as they happen.

Comments have been turned off since I moved over to Humzoo.

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