Where To Find Your Next House
Looking for a new home? Gone are the days of driving around neighborhoods, scouting out For Sale signs. Newspapers are even irrelevant to the home search nowadays. And you can forget trucking it over to your local open house. Online MLS listings, online classified ads, online high-powered search maps and even online virtual tours have made it so that the first human contact may not come until the closing.
It’s shocking, but true - it’s a digital age. Some say it’s convenient, but others say it’s sad. At any rate, most people (particularly under age 35) could name at least three great web sites to aid the real estate search. However, in a recent column for USA Today, tech wiz and radio show host Kim Komando compiled a pretty comprehensive list:
-Realtor.com is the official site of the National Association of Realtors.
-RealtyTrac.com categorizes listings according to pre-foreclosure, bank-owned, government-owned, FSBO, auction, resale and new. It’s very comprehensive and user-friendly, but costs about $50 monthly after the seven-day free trial.
-Foreclosures.com has foreclosure listings with market value and the percentage of equity in the home. Again, a seven-day free trial followed by a $50 monthly fee.
-BargainNetwork.com advertises thousands of foreclosures and FSBOs nationwide, but will not allow you to browse the site without signing up for a free trial membership, to be followed by a $40 monthly fee. The catch on these seven-day trials is that you must enter your credit card information, which will be charged if you do not call the company and cancel. In some situations, there may even be a $40 or $50 hold placed on your card during the trial period, so be forewarned.
-HomeSales.gov lists federal government-owned properties to be sold at auction, many of which are HUD homes.
-Trulia.com allows searches to be saved and referenced later, and e-mail notices can be sent out whenever there are new listings matching your search criteria.
Kim Komando lists other resources, like the home value calculator and neighborhood property value “heat maps” on Zillow.com. Of course, we wouldn’t want to forget about sites like FSBO.com and ByOwner.com, and Komando also recommends searching official government web sites for foreclosure listings. And of course, there’s always our good friend Craig. Warning: searching for real estate online, regardless of whether you are serious about buying, is a very time-consuming and addicting process. Proceed carefully!
