The day we first saw the house we eventually bought, we also looked at seven others in 2 1/2 hours. It was November 2000 and the Bay Area housing market was reaching a new peak of insanity.

We spent about 15 minutes looking at our future home in north Oakland. We submitted a bid that night and found out the next day our offer had been accepted. Less than two weeks later, we had closed. The next day, my wife was looking at our new house when a neighbor mistook her for the previous owner and said:

``Gosh, I bet you're glad to be getting out of there!''

Gulp.

Turns out we were moving in next to a house that had become the source of repeated noise and trash complaints, prompting residents to write letters to the owners threatening legal action. Though we've generally been happy with the neighborhood, the occasional thump-thump of stereos blasting in the neighbor's front yard causes our house to shake just often enough to make us wish we'd known what we were getting ourselves into.

Of course, we should have done more research on the neighborhood in all respects. Fortunately, there are numerous sources of information to be found online that will give you the lowdown on everything in the neighborhood you're interested in, from housing costs to crime to schools.

The vast amount of information online now can be crucial given the speed at which the housing market continues to move.

To demonstrate some of the possibilities, I decided to do the research on our neighborhood that I wish we had done three years ago. In just a few hours, I had a pretty detailed picture.

Good starting points are the housing Web sites available through the major Internet portals such as Yahoo and America Online. I went to the one run by MSN and typed in our ZIP code: 94609. The search immediately returned an overwhelming amount of demographic data.

I learned, for instance, that of the 21,000 people living in this ZIP code, 39.09 percent are ``inner cities'' and 12 percent are ``Bohemian mix.'' These categories are how marketers see the demographics, which means, according to the definitions provided, the first group eats Cap'n Crunch while the latter drinks bottled water.

This is followed by sections with statistics on population mix, economics, crime, education, transportation, health and safety, cost of living and housing.

It's a lot to digest, but what's most useful is that any statistic that falls below the national average is highlighted in red. A quick glance tells me that a lot of the educational and crime stats are worse than the national average.

Now that I've got a general picture of this neighborhood, I want to know about my street. I surf over to Domania.com, which will give me the prices that my house and surrounding houses sold for all the way back to 1987.

I type in our address and discover that we paid about twice as much for our house as the previous owners did just two years earlier. While that's a bummer, the good news is that housing prices all around us have continued to rise since we bought.

Armed with oodles of stats now, I want a more ground-level view. My two biggest concerns are crime and education.

I go to the Web site for the Oakland Unified School District, which has a school locator. I type in our address and find out that my son (just 4 months old) would attend Washington Elementary, Claremont Middle School and Oakland Technical Senior High School.

I make a quick call to the school district for more detailed information on each school. They refer me to the Web site for the California Department of Education.

Once there, I follow the links to the Academic Performance Index reports. The API measures school performance based on standardized test scores.

These scores are broken down by district, county and school. Besides test scores, there's a wealth of stats such as racial breakdown, parental educational levels, school lunch program participants and average class size. On a scale where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest, I find that Washington gets a 2; Claremont gets a 3; and Oakland Tech gets a 2.