Start Your (search) Engines

Trulia.com  Innovative and easy-to-use, this site allows you to search for homes in your desired neighborhood and compare the price to other properties for sale in that area. Under its “trends” section, Trulia offers info about where prices are increasing, where they’re falling and which towns have been hit by foreclosures. But the best feature is the hyper-local information about median prices and historical data.

Zillow.com  Similar to Trulia, this site gives specific data about various markets. But we also like the near-instant estimates of home values in a specific area—a useful (and fascinating) tool.

DQnews.com  Using the statistics from its owner DataQuick—one of the nation’s most comprehensive databases of real estate information—this online publication offers free reports about specific markets, including Denver. Plus, each quarter, the number gurus churn out charts by zip code, giving buyers and sellers specific information about median prices, sales volume and changes from the same period the year before.

Recolorado.com  We’re pretty sure we lost whole days checking out properties on this user-friendly site. If you’ve found a neighborhood or mountain town you love—and even a street on which you want to reside—this site gives you easy access to listings.

Ziprealty.com  These folks who run ZipRealty would like you to use their agents when you buy or sell your home; they even offer financial incentives for clients. But you don’t need to sign up to use some of the site’s best features, including a list of homes recently sold in your neighborhood—along with their selling prices—and an interactive (and surprisingly helpful) “neighborhood finder.”