WASHINGTON -- Hotpads.com may be the nation's largest rental listing, but it's also gaining a reputation as a hot new source of first-time homebuyer information.

The 150,000 rental and 1.5 million home sale listings themselves aren't the draw; instead, what has attracted the attention of The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Time, and numerous online media outlets and blogs, is how the Web site presents the information.

Users search listings by neighborhood, using flash-powered maps that allow them to click and zoom to see properties available in specific neighborhoods.

But that's not where the information ends. The site also uses heat maps to provide foreclosure rates and rent ratios in each market, providing analytical market information young and transitioning homebuyers can consider before shopping real estate.

The site draws about 1 million hits per month from mostly Gen X and Gen Y users, said Douglas Pope, the 27-year-old company co-founder. Pope's site is such a hot topic, he was chosen to moderate an educational session at last month's Millennial Financial Services Forum in New York. That event also featured a session moderated by Filene's Ben Rogers, director of the think tank's CU Tomorrow project, and included credit union industry panelists.

"The heat maps give people a very quick, visual analysis of the market," Pope said. "You could go through a long list or an Excel spread sheet and try to figure it out, or you can just visualize it quickly on a map."

If an area has a high rate of foreclosures, Pope said, consumers can assume that home prices are likely to fall.

"We're really geared toward that first-time homebuyer who's not sure if it's time to leap into the market or not, and we also have people who are making the reverse transition, from homeownership to rentals. Maybe they're moving to a new city and don't want to take the equity risk until they know the market has hit bottom," Pope said, adding, "A mortgage is a big risk nowadays, and people want to make informed decisions."

Rent ratios compare whether consumers get more value from renting or buying in a specific neighborhood. The data sources are complex, but the basic equation is simple: take the median sale price of a home in a neighborhood and divide it by the annual rent for a comparable home in the same neighborhood.

"The rent ratio heat map shows which areas have larger price discrepancy for sale versus rental properties, which is also an indicator of housing problems," Pope said. "If there's a large discrepancy, there's a possibility that sale prices will decline further, leading to more foreclosures."

Pope said he's added foreclosure rate and rent ratio information to his listings site so his users can make more knowledgeable financial decisions, a quality "how to market to Gen Y" presenters have touted in industry conference educational sessions this year.

The young entrepreneur said he's currently looking for mortgage partners or advertisers for his site and mused that his self-help, informational approach might make a good match for the credit union industry.

American Credit Union Mortgage Association President Bob Dorsa said he hasn't yet seen hotpads.com, but said he's not surprised a colorful, interactive Web site is drawing young users.

"[Young adults] obviously have a different set of decision-making metrics than their parents and grandparents," Dorsa said. "I guess my only reservation would be that we are in an extraordinary circumstance relative to foreclosure, and maybe the present isn't an indicator of what the future might bring, and I think people are coming to this site looking for some sort of confidence or security."

Hopefully, young homebuyers won't take the site as gospel, and will source traditional information sources too, like real estate agents, he said.

Pope admitted his site isn't an absolutely complete source of rental or foreclosure information, but it's one of the best available online. Hotpads uses its own data from its rental and sales listings when creating heat maps, and the company boasts the nation's largest online for-rent list. Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac.com, owner of the nation's largest foreclosure database and a common news source, provides sales listings and data.

RealtyTrac has added heat mapping to its site, too. Users begin foreclosure property searches by clicking on a map, which is color-coded according to foreclosure activity. Both sites show that high foreclosure rates are mostly located in urban areas that experienced a lot of new development during the real estate boom.

"We find that Florida has been particularly hit by foreclosures because there has been so much development, which attracts a lot of speculative buyers," Pope said. "So, when you look at foreclosure heat maps it looks really bad in Florida, almost everything is red. California is the same deal," he said.

Daren Blomquist, RealtyTrac spokesman, said inland California, southern Florida on both coasts and Las Vegas

are getting even worse. The greater Washington-area, including parts of both Maryland and Virginia had a tough first half of 2008, as did Phoenix, he said.

"Michigan and Ohio are still up there, but maybe they've hit a turning point, because it seems like they're beginning to level off," Blomquist said, "which may be an indication that some of those areas have reached a foreclosure saturation."

But, Blomquist said, because the two states have experienced economic-driven foreclosures, rather than "the real estate market growing out of whack," the economy will dictate the future.

It's also good news for Denver so far this year, Blomquist said. Development along the Rocky Mountains' front range was a foreclosure trouble spot as early as 2006, he said, and while foreclosure rates are still high, they've leveled off a bit.

Sales have picked up in some areas, Blomquist said, suggesting that prices have fallen low enough to attract buyers, even thought the market probably hasn't bottomed out yet. Today's buyers are willing to take that risk, he said.

However, there are so many foreclosed properties on the market, they're dictating market price.

"We don't track foreclosures as a percentage of sales, but speaking with Realtors and other folks in the industry, we've heard that serious buyers believe that anything other than a foreclosure is overpriced," Blomquist said. "Plus, banks, for the most part, want to get rid of properties as soon as possible, so it makes sense that foreclosure sales are becoming a bigger percentage of overall sales."

--handerson@cutimes.com

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Young Homebuyers and Renters Surf Heat Maps Online Before Settling Down

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