Matt Goyer digs up a new tool that help you calculate the costs of home ownership. HouseMath 2.0 lets you calculate all the costs associated with your new purchase and gives you a true monthly cost of owning your new home.
Online property searches are evolving quickly and are morphing away from simply displaying listings on a map. Adding the proper context to the data, like Trulia’s heat maps or Oodle’s Index or Shackprices‘ neighborhood suggestions, is the next frontier of real estate online.
I’ve always liked mortgage calculators as part of a listing page – it lets a buyer quickly see if they can afford the property they are looking at. That said, most mortgage calculators only work as function of the term, down payment and interest rate and are therefore not truly reflective of the full cost of home ownership. (Unfortunately, they also tend to quickly crush my fantasies when I see how much that nice 4 bedroom is going to probably going to cost me)
HouseMath aims to fix that. It gives you a very detailed analysis what it’s going to cost you per month to own that home. It even gives you a number of charts so you can see what a buyer can truly afford. It seems to me this could be particularly useful for investors as well.
I can’t testify to it’s accuracy of their calculations as I’m no financial whiz but I’d love to hear what others find out (Noah?)
HouseMath is not live in all cities right now and does not have complete market data for all of its cities (i.e. some cities are limited to condos, or houses).
But, I’d love to see one of the big Real Estate 2.0 guys take look at this and implement it or something similar on their sites. HouseMath is already tied into Zillow’s API, so it would make sense that they could use this to supplement their Zestimates and homes for sale. Dontcha think?
