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The Web's Rate-a-Lawyer

Finding and vetting a good lawyer can be a challenge. To make the process more consumer-friendly, Mark Britton, a former general counsel at Expedia.com, is trying to tear a page from the travel Web site's playbook in creating his year- old site, avvo.com. Avvo (from the Italian word for lawyer, avvocato) rates lawyers on a scale from 1 to 10 by scrutinizing their professional and disciplinary histories. The free service uses that data to create profiles that can include client reviews and peer endorsements.

Britton, a lawyer for 16 years —he rates an 8.2 on the site—hopes to offer more transparency and better guidance than a popular resource for many consumers: the Yellow Pages (T). For the growing number of Americans grappling with foreclosures, bankruptcies, and other legal woes, Avvo has a forum where consumers can anonymously ask legal questions and get personalized answers from real lawyers (though without attorney-client privilege).

So far, Avvo profiles lawyers in only 18 mostly large states and the District of Columbia. And a good number of listings may be too bare-bones to be much help.

Even so, the site has already ruffled a few feathers. Days after it launched, a listed lawyer filed a suit challenging the rating system. The judge threw out the case.

—By Tata Kalwarski

Tracking the Rent-Price Ratio

One indicator is the rent-to-price ratio—the difference between the price of a house and the amount of rent tenants would pay to live in it. If a house priced at $283,000 would rent for $10,000 a year ($833 a month), the rent-price ratio would be about 3.5%. Economists Morris Davis, Andreas Lehnert, and Robert Martin tapped into a national home-price database and found the rent-price ratio averaged 5.29% from 1960 to 1995. But from 1995 to 2006 a home-buying frenzy drove the ratio down to a historically low rate of 3.5%. The ratio climbed to 3.93% in the first quarter of 2008.

By that benchmark, assuming modest rent growth, home prices may need to fall 10% more over the next two years to bring the ratio near to its historic average. While the market hasn't yet reached bottom, the ratio signals that residential real estate could soon be more attractive. "I am much more optimistic than the market seems to be right now," says Davis. "Two years ago, I was pessimistic."

—By Christopher Farrell