When moving to a new town, most homebuyers use the internet to check out the schools, taxes, parks, transportation, shopping, etc. On my own Real Estate office's website, it's pretty easy to pull up recent demographic information for any zip code. A screen shot of the basics can be seen below.
Drilling further down, many more detailed stats pop up. You can now also see an up to the month video update of any town's current Real Estate Market(click on graphics to enlarge):