Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 30, 1995 TAG: 9508300065
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
For $10, a 10-minute call gives you information on up to 24 properties in a single city. The service has three search options: You can request the sale price of a particular house, the sales history of an entire street or a listing of all homes sold in the city in a particular price range. You can switch back and forth among the options during the call and can request a free fax copy of the information you hear.
Information in the service dates from 1989 and is updated weekly. Home sales typically are entered within six weeks of the closing.
Sounds neat, but is it worth the $10?
Despite the novelty of the delivery, there's nothing privileged about the information provided. Consumer Reports gets its figures from the same place that's open to any Joe Citizen: the public registry. In states where home sales prices are part of the public record, anyone can go to the local register of deeds and request the numbers - free of charge. In many cities, including Roanoke, home sales are listed in the newspaper.
Roanoke is not included in the new service; in Virginia, only Alexandria and Arlington and Fairfax counties are covered. Also, the service is not available for cities in Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Texas and Utah, where prices of homes are not part of the public record, or in Hawaii and Alaska.
Perhaps most importantly, a phone call won't tell prospective buyers anything about a neighborhood except the cost of houses. Someone who calls the service could find out that a particular home sold for $250,000 last year, for instance, but not that the house is located under a high-voltage power line or near a tire reprocessing plant. And someone who isn't familiar with a city won't know which streets to search.
"It cannot replace really being there, in a city," said Sue Gotwalt, vice president of marketing for Boone & Co. Realtors.
Don Constable, president of the Roanoke Valley Association of Realtors and a Century 21 Realtor, agreed. "At best, it would be a ballpark guide," he said. "You can have the same type of house on two different streets and have widely varied prices."
What the Home Price Service can do, both Gotwalt and Constable said, is give potential buyers some bidding leverage for property they like. If you know what a particular house last sold for, and what houses in the same neighborhood are worth, you'll have a better idea of how low the seller will go.
If you have Internet access, you may want to check several World Wide Web sites that feature home listings and price services. The Home Sales page, http: //www.insure.com/ home/Sales/, offers a service similar to the Consumer Reports telephone program. For $5, you can search by single address, street or price range in a selected number of cities.
Other sites, including the New Homes Guides page - http:// www.homefair.com/homepage.html - feature listings of new homes currently on the market. This one also provides detailed maps of selected cities and allows you to search for homes by geographical area.
Imagine buying a swimsuit that doesn't require tugging. Or a pair of shoes that fit both feet, not just the left one.
Custom Clothing Technology Corp. of Newton, Mass., is imagining right along with you. And they're the perfect people to have on your side in the battle against ill-fitting clothing. As many a denim-tormented woman could say, Custom Clothing is the company that last year worked with Levi Strauss to offer custom-fit jeans for women.
The idea behind the jeans program is simple: Clerks measure a customer's waist, hips, inseam and rise, then the exact measurements are sent directly to the manufacturer. The custom-fit jeans sell for about $10 more than off-the-rack pairs and are available only through official Levi's stores. (If you're desperate for a pair of jeans that really fits, a store is scheduled to open at Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia within a week.)
What the company did for women's love-hate relationship with denim it now wants to do for other apparel areas. It didn't take a bunch of rocket scientists to figure out which market segments to tackle next, said Sung Park, president of Custom Clothing.
"Put on your consumer's hat for a minute," he said. "What articles of clothing do you have the most trouble buying?''
After jeans? Well, there's swimwear, bras, shoes ...
Bingo, Park said. Custom Clothing is in the middle of developing custom-fitting programs for these items, which, he said, have been using artificial sizing systems designed with manufacturers, not consumers, in mind. It's too early to predict when made-for-you swimsuits, shoes and underwear will hit the stores, he said, but the company is negotiating with manufacturers and marketers.
Ah, but the thought of being closeted in a small cubicle while a complete stranger wraps a tape measure around your body doesn't appeal to you? Not to worry - Park said they're working on other ways of taking measurements, such as digital cameras.
Men may have to wait a while for this kind of service. There tends to be less variation among male bodies, making custom fitting less of a necessity, Park said.
by CNB