He said it would ensure the work can be done and I can be protected.Expense Numbers:$184,000 Purchase price, comps for only a 4 BR SFH excluding carriage house and garage are $245,000$140,000 Repairs/improvements, including addition of a 2nd floor to the carriage house.

As for free websites, zillow and trulia can do a decent job of giving you active-listing data.

Sometimes they are there to help people.Secondly, the image data is from August 2011.

There are too many variables to determine any reliable statistical data on the matter.

Search city and county building departments, multifamily broker's research departments (such as Marcus & Millichap), multifamily lender's research departments (such as Hendricks Berkadia) apartment data providers (such as alndata.com, MPF Research, Axiometrics, Real Data, etc.)

Agents will list the property very low for activity ensuring they can submit the offer to the lender postponing the foreclosure.

:I respectfully have to disagree with you, @jscott. 7 out of the top 10 high schools are located in Montgomery county including the overall #1 (Which has been for awhile) Walt Whitman.http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/...As with anything education related, you can generally find data that supports anything/everything. 

How do you ensure your broker that you are being ethical and honoring your fiduciary duty and document your disclosures on paper?

In this regard, we can use the Census Bureau data to see how many homes are just sitting vacant, owner occupied or being rented.

The only way to know is to read the contract.What they have done is to eliminate the responsibility of the settlement agent to ensure the terms and agreements contracted have been met, they can't be responsible for something they have no knowledge of.Your title insurance is an insured closing, meaning the title insurance covers errors and omissions in the closing and settlement according to the contract as agreed, if they don't get the contract they can't ensure terms were met and they won't insure any error in missing something not disclosed.IMO, your settlement agent and title insurance company are avoiding risks by simply accepting instructions and basically performing only an accounting and administrative function of filing and document collection along with tax filings.