Oopsle Index -- open for

Oopsle Index -- open for breakfast The premise: classified search engine Oodle, which aggregates classified listings from more than 75,000 sources, launched an "Oodle Index" tool today, allowing users to compare listings by price in different cities and neighborhoods. Sounds promising -- buyers presumably know how much house they can afford, and Oodle Index will show them the cities or neighborhoods with the most listings in their price range. Median prices for cities or neighborhoods can be displayed side by side in a bar graph, and you click on the bar to see the listings.

The problem: In the demo of Oodle Index I got today, we looked at Oakland, Calif. The median price of listings in the city's Lake Merritt neighborhood, according, to Oodle Index was $302,500 -- exciting news considering the median home price in Oakland is about $500,000 and Lake Merritt is one of the nicer neighborhoods. But clicking on the graph got me 9 listings in Lake Merritt, ranging in price from $159,000 to $679,000. When I added them up, the average price was about $509,000, and the median price was $440,000. Oopsle. On the low end, the $159,000 listing turned out to be a restaurant, and two of the homes listed were far from the area most people consider to be Lake Merritt (the lineup of properties has changed slightly since this morning, but the puzzling discrepancy between Oodle Index and Oodle listings remains).

The solution? Even if the Oodle Index worked as advertised, it's not clear exactly what it would be telling you, since the listings on the site may not always be comprehensive or even representative. The Oodle Index search I just did for Oakland returned 1,357 results. Nearly half -- 554 -- were foreclosures (with links back to sites like RealtyTrac that charge you for more detailed information on listings). If foreclosed properties are overrepresented, that could skew the Oodle Index. Instead of helping me find the area that's got the most homes in my price range, won't it steer me to the neighborhoods with the most foreclosed properties in my price range? Which is not neccessarily bad, but maybe not what I thought I was asking for.

The Oodle Index is also tracking rents and used car prices (the asking prices anyway), and Oodle says these stats can provide valuable insight into markets and pricing. Increasing rents, for example, suggest weakness in real estate. The company has already generated reports on six major markets. I'm not sure how much faith to put into these reports, but if anybody is looking to get into the restaurant business in downtown Oakland, check out the $159,000 listing Oodle Index found for me at 308 14th St. (pictured). Just keep in mind you're only buying the business, not the building. Rent is $2,700 a month and your lease is up next March.
--Matt Carter, Inman News
UPDATE: Oodle VP of marketing (and co-founder) Faith Sedlin just got back to me with responses to some of the questions I had about the site after this morning's demo: Oodle Index uses more stringent search inclusion criteria than the search function, because some users may want to view properties that are "perhaps but not definitively in" a neighborhood, Sedlin said. Some Zip codes span two neighborhoods, for example. "Given ... that the numbers in graphs and results don't add up, we probably should footnote this on the site so it is clear to users," she says. Sedlin said Oodle will reevaluate the potential for "skew" effect if foreclosure properties are included in the index, and may end up excluding them. Also, the restaurant would not have showed up in the results if the search parameters provided by Oodle had been narrowed to "homes" rather than set to "all" (which included commercial properties and land).

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