Real Estate for the Young and Clueless

The Maestro and my Brother-from-Another live in this adorable historic neighborhood on the northeast side of town called Mayfield. It has beautiful, historic houses on wide, tree-lined streets. If you're actually inside of Mayfield, you'd never believe that you were inside Baltimore's city limits. Think Homewood or Guilford for the slightly less loaded.

Every year, Mayfield's Community Association hosts a home and garden tour, where about 10 different familes open up their homes and/or gardens for residents and guests to walk through, observe, ooh and ah, etc. The 2008 home and garden tour was a few rainy Sundays ago, and The Maestro and I went with his recently ex-other roommate.

By the time the 10th house rolled around, we were all a little tuckered out, but it was well worth the wait. It was a gorgeous house with breathtaking views of Lake Montebello. Best of all, it's also on the market. I spent the rest of the day begging The Maestro to buy it. And much to the chagrin of everyone with whom I interract on a regular basis, I've been talking about this house ever since. Just for giggles, I sent the listing to my mother a few days ago. She responded yesterday with the results from this website. You can plug any address into this bad boy, and it gives you the property's stats (i.e. # of beds/baths, square footage), something it calls a Zestimate (estimated market value), a tax assessor's estimate, bird's eye views of the property from Google Earth, neighborhood information, previous sale and listing information if applicable, and even more cool stuff that it's pretty impossible to list all that it does.

What's even more fun is that you can plug any address into this, so it's a good way of getting an informal value of your property if you own and are thinking ahead to when you're going to sell next. I'm not a real estate junkie. I'm young, I just happen to like what I like. Seeing all of the statistics for this house that's been the subject of my daydreams for the past few weeks helps put things into perspective for someone who's otherwise unsavvy to the ways of the real estate market.

Go to zillow.com to start playing.