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Checking out schools? Web makes it easier

As go the schools, so goes the real estate."

This mantra among real-estate brokers has long been a reality for buyers and sellers.

But though a good school district has always been a powerful driver of housing costs in a neighborhood, never before has it been so easy to know how different districts compare.

Between the rise of the Internet and new laws that require more standardized testing and greater public access to test results, home buyers can much more readily compare public schools.

Such was the experience of Jim and Karen Keefe. It made their move from New Jersey to Ohio the easiest yet for the couple.

When we moved east seven years ago, the Internet was just emerging," Karen Keefe said. "This time around, I had so much at my fingertips."

Shortly after her husband accepted a position last year as a vice president at a publishing company in northern Kentucky, Karen Keefe turned to the Web to scour for school districts across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.

With the click of a mouse, she found statistics that resembled those of their competitive New Jersey district.

Housing markets used to be driven by word of mouth. Parents tended to rely on general reputation when it came to understanding which schools were best. Now parents on the move are flocking to Web sites detailing student-performance statistics and district comparisons.

Homestore.com, which features such school reports, averaged 8.65 million unique users a month in 2004. Users surfed the site for about 300 million minutes in February 2005 alone, according to the most recent figures.

School information is the second-most-popular feature after actual listings, corporate communications director Erin Campbell said.

Good schools have long been linked with higher home prices. The price difference between top-scoring and mediocre districts can exceed $70,000 in some medium-size cities.

In the Sycamore Community School District, where the Keefes moved, the average home price is $182,438, compared with the neighboring Loveland school district, where the average house sells for $106,580.

The price gap is in keeping with the scores. Last year, about 80 percent of Sycamore high-school seniors took the SAT and averaged 579 in math and 566 on the verbal portion. Sixty percent of Loveland seniors took the SAT, averaging 547 in math and 535 on the verbal section.

Cities on the coasts and in Southern states such as Florida and Texas have the largest gaps in home prices and test scores. In Brookline, Mass., for instance, spending $250,000 more means the difference between living in a top-notch district instead of a mediocre one.

The starting price for a three bedroom, two-bath house in Brookline is $700,000, said Kathleen Alexander, a real-estate agent at Century 21 Cityside. In the nearby Melrose-Stoneham area, a comparable house sells for $450,000.

Brookline High School scored significantly higher on the 2004 SAT test than did Melrose High School.

But statistics on school districts get mixed with other concerns, said Eric Belsky, the executive director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University.

It has to do with "social capital," the contacts and connections people foster. Home buyers tend to associate test scores with social capital, Belsky said, and standardized testing becomes a "shorthand way to make a judgment."