If you're looking for information about a particular suburb or a neighborhood in the city of Chicago, check out the Chicago Tribune's Real Estate website. It has a lot of great information and detailed profiles for hundreds of communities.

Frustrated buyers, we have found a great tool for you! Beatyouthere.com is a real estate website that launched this week with over two million property listings - designed for the homebuyer who wants all of the info! Beatyouthere.com features a unique interactive tool, so that registered users can post comments and review listings, homes they've visited or even realtors that they've worked with. And it makes perfect sense. After all, we check out reviews of restaurants before we eat there, why wouldn't we do our homework on a purchase as major as a home?

According to the National Association of Realtors, The Pending Home Sales Index, a forward-looking indicator based on contracts signed in August, jumped 8.8% from about a year ago. The index is actually at its highest level since June of 2007.

Last week, I interviewed a gentleman from Prudential Preferred Properties, who talked about a tool on their website that allows people to understand what's happening in real estate in their area. At first glance, Market Watch seemed like one of those basic reports that gives you realtor jargon and graphs that mean nothing to you, but I signed up anyway. When I started to receive the weekly reports via email I learned several things:

1- My husband and I should have waited another year to buy. (I kept that little nugget to myself)
2- The Market Watch report comes in an abreviated form (called a "summary report") for people like myself who suffer from self-diagnosed ADD.
and 3- There's no guessing - they tell you what all the graphs and numbers mean to you in straight, easy-to-understand terms. Love that.

More info after the jump...

Today is tax day -- Do you have a big tax bill? Are you still procrastinating writing the check and dropping it in the mail?

Maybe this will cheer you up for your 2009 taxes! Remember the federal government is giving you a tax credit of up to $8,000 for qualified first-time home buyers purchasing a principal residence on or after January 1, 2009 and before December 1, 2009. Unlike the tax credit enacted in 2008, the new credit does not have to be repaid. Read more from National Association of Home Builders.

Let's say you're strolling through the streets of Rome, thinking how nice it would be to just give it all up and spend the rest of your life seeing the sights and taste-testing gelato. "If only I knew what homes were going for around here," you say to yourself. If only, indeed.

As of last week, iPhones and Android devices have a new app that can tell you recent sale prices, show you photos and listing info for homes that are currently on the market and save your favorite properties, all within your gps location, almost anywhere in the world. Or, of course you can plug in your search parameters and get listing results in that way too. It's by Coldwell Banker and from what I can tell, it's pretty handy.

I just installed it on my iPhone and in the 10 minutes that I played around with it, I found more than 30 properties within two miles of my office. So, if I ever become totally fed up with my commute, a new home just a short walk away from my office is at my fingertips (for argument's sake let's just imagine that selling my current home and coming up with the $3-million that it would cost me to live on Michigan Avenue is not an issue). Within seconds, I found one that sounded interesting, scanned the specs, checked it out on a map and viewed a slideshow of the home's pics. Were I serious about buying a $3-million home, it would have been just as easy to schedule a showing. Clicking "contact" on the details page directed me to the phone number and email of the listing agent.

And since we can't overlook that it's an international application, I did a quick search of Italian villas in Florence just in case I decide that a vacation home is in order when I get my big bonus. (Companies are still doing that, right???) I found a gorgeous 1 bedroom, 2 bath townhouse with stunning 17th century frescoes for the low, low price of $3.4 million U.S.dollars. I'll stash that in my saved properties until the time is right.

So, I don't know what this "housing crisis" is that everyone's talking about...finding listed homes has never beed easier. ;)

Check out a youtube video of the free Coldwell Banker app here.