I mean, it’s not like I have any illusions about the privacy of anything I do or say online, but this one surprises me. Go head, put your street address into Google. (If you’ved moved recently, use the address of someone you know who has been in one place for a while. See what comes up – not on Zillow, that’s meant to guestimate the value of al houses, but on actual real estates like Trulia or homes.com. I hadn’t realized this, because we bought our lake house in 2010 and our house here last year, so it’s reasonable that real estate sites would still have the info from previous sales.
Mom told me there’s now a real estate site on her lawn. (I am very happy about her moving, though there is some nostalgia since that house was home from when they brought me home from the hspital at a week old until I moved into a college dorm, and then for breaks until I graduated college and moved away. Still, it’s just a bit of misplaced saudade – I was eager to leave at 17 and wouldn’t live there again if you paid me.) Anyway, her house clearly isn’t listed yet – there’s no firm price, just an estimate. But there’s a picture of the outside (and they got the right house on a street of identical rowhouses), an accurate statement of the house’s size and features, number of rooms and so on, and an estimated price. They’ve lived there since 1966; it’s not like the house has been for sale in the entire lifetime of the internet. I checked out my in-laws’ house, too: same deal, complete with mention of the fireplace and type of heater. They built that house in the 1970s – it has never been for sale. THere’s a picture that’s quite recent; I can tell because it shows the landscaping they did a while back, all nicely grown in.
I knew Zillow had most of this, but the detailed info on houses that haven’t even been sold in decades, on sites that exist just to sell houses, just feels intrusive. I suppose they’d justify it by saying the information is on public record and that anyone buying a house nearby would want to know neighborhood values.
ETA: I just checked, and if you’re signed in (which you can do under your Facebook or Google ID without having to set up an account) Redfin will actually show you pictures from inside the house. At least, they will on houses like mine, that were sold recently. Luckily, the pictures aren’t exactly of our house here; it was newly bult in a community of townhouses, so the pics are of the model houses. There are a few actual pictures from inside our lake house – terrible ones taken before the renovation work that was done before we even saw the place.