  We present first results from our study of the properties of ~400 low
redshift (z < 0.5) quasars, based on a large homogeneous dataset derived from
the Stripe 82 area of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7).
For this sky region, deep (r~22.4) u,g,r,i,z images are available, up to ~2 mag
deeper than standard SDSS images, allowing us to study both the host galaxies
and the Mpc-scale environments of the quasars. This sample greatly outnumbers
previous studies of low redshift quasar hosts, from the ground or from space.
Here we report the preliminary results for the quasar host galaxies. We are
able to resolve the host galaxy in ~80 % of the quasars. The quasar hosts are
luminous and large, the majority of them in the range between M*-1 and M*-2,
and with ~10 kpc galaxy scale-lengths. Almost half of the host galaxies are
best fit with an exponential disk, while the rest are spheroid-dominated. There
is a reasonable relation between the central black hole mass and the host
galaxy luminosity.
