I am nosy, too. I checked the tax assessor site to find out how many late tax filers exist on my street, and I regularly check foreclosure.com for NOD and auctions on Poway homes. When I still had my Realtytrac.com membership, I snooped even more: I looked at the lien history of the NODs (foreclosure.com doesn’t provide it).
Sometimes the databases we check are not accurate. Then we get false information. This is too bad, but I think we should point the finger at the database, not at the snooper.
I quit my realtytrac.com subscription due to their inaccuracy. Whenever a homeowner brought his NOD up to date, realtytrac did not list it as Inactive. I let them know why I quit my membership.
Tracking the falling prices and NODs is a great way to track the declining market, and to find out how people got themselves into these situations.
If this were reported in the newspapers, I wouldn’t need to spend this time researching, uhm, I mean snooping…