If you're interested in seeing what your house would cost in another market anywhere in the country, there's an easy-to-use index on the Internet.

Coldwell Banker's Home Price Comparison Index can be found on the Information Booth page at www.coldwellbanker.com. Bankrate.com looked at several Web sites offering similar indexes and, in our opinion, Coldwell's is superior. The annually revised index has been available for 20 years and the last few indexes have been posted on the Internet. It's easy to use and gives plenty of information about the company's annual study evaluating 350 markets.

"It gives you a benchmark," says Gabrielle Sertich of Coldwell Banker Real Estate in Parsipany, N.J. "If you're moving from Kansas City to Connecticut, you'll have to adjust how much house you can buy."

The index is based on a "subject home" with the following criteria: single-family home, 2,200 square feet, four bedrooms, two and one-half bathrooms, family room, two-car garage in a typical, middle-management neighborhood.

Location, location, location
To show you what extremes this country has in the housing market, Coldwell says the subject home is cheapest in Oklahoma City where it would cost an average of $107,850. But try to buy our subject home in Palo Alto, Calif., the index's most expensive market, and that four-bedroom house will cost an average $843,500.

There are a couple ways to use the index. There is what amounts to about 18 pages of data in a section titled "1999 Home Price Comparison Index Values." The average sales price of the subject home is listed for major and mid-size metropolitan areas in each state, along with the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and Canada. This gives you a bird's eye view of what the subject home would cost in a wide variety of places.

If there's a particular area where you'd like to see what your house would cost, go to the section titled "Calculate Specific Markets."

Enter the market value of your home, then, from a drop-down menu select the closest area to where your home is located. From another menu select a market you'd like to consider. The site will then calculate how much it would cost to replace your home in the new market.

Pricey places to settle down
Coldwell says seven of the country's 10 most expensive markets are in California and five of the country's top 10 markets when it comes to affordability are in Texas. The subject home is most expensive in the Northeast -- $240,504; followed by the West where it would cost $207,113; the Midwest, $167,985 and the Southeast, $163,624.

Coldwell's Home Price Comparison Index is also available in a brochure at any Coldwell Banker office. The brochure will give you a simple math formula to calculate what it would cost to replace your house in another market.

-- Posted: Dec. 22, 1999