Finding a House (Part II)
Aug/090
Not having a real estate agent at the moment (we now have one 
)we’ve resorted to using some online tools for looking for houses. Below are the ones we have used thus far along with some comments as to our experience.
Zillow.com
Overall Experience: Great place to get ideas for prices in certain neighborhoods and how many houses are for sale. Easy to use and very interactive. It’s also interesting to see what houses have sold for in the past.
Pros: Easy to use, interactive maps for neighborhoods (ability to focus on certain areas of the map), and I was able to get the results I wanted using the many different fields for defining your search.
Cons: It was easy to use but loading can sometimes be an issue. Navigation back and for from page to page can also be a little clunky.
Zillow iPhone App
Overall Experience: Awesome! This was a great tool when we were out and about driving around without any direction. Very often there were houses for sale but there was not a flyer available. With this app we were able to quickly load it and find out the house price using the GPS. I would estimate that greater than 75% of the time the house was listed at the time. However, the status of the house was not always correct as in, the house could have sold recently but the Zillow database was not yet updated.
Pros: Utilizes GPS to find your current location. Same type of interface and options as the website. Easy to use and would recommend for those random house hunts.
Cons: There were numerous times that I got frustrated because the app doesn’t save your search criteria or settings when closing the app. (I may have missed this in the settings if it were available)…
Various Realty Websites
Sites: EdinaRealty.com, Century21.com, ColdwellBanker.com, etc
Overall Experience: More often than not, we were able to find all the same houses on all the realty websites. The kicker was that each interface was a different experience.
Suggestions:
- Allow multiple zip codes, cities, or neighborhood queries. There were times when we were limited to looking at one area at a time.
- Cleanup the layout of some of the content. Some content was squished together, especially when maps were involved. If possible, make the the layout a little wider, open up in a modal window, new window, etc.
- Better integration of maps. I would say 80% of the time I found it easier to copy the address into Google Maps to see the street view of the house than to use the map that was integrated into the website. If you are going to offer maps I would suggest using both Bing and Google Maps. Bing has an awesome aerial view compared to Google Maps. However, Google Maps has street view.
The MLS Online
Overall Experience: This is probably my favorite choice! MLS Online has a some really great search options, easy to use, and gives you a ton of results.
Pros: Extremely easy to use. Email notifications for new houses that meet your criteria (if you set it up). Detailed house information and a clean layout. Ability to save multiple search criterion. Added the ability to search for foreclosures.
Cons: Does not provide the # of days on the market.
Sorry for the novel. Hope this helps the fellow house hunters out there or even the developers for the above sites.
Finding a House (Part I)
Jul/092
For the past few weeks the process of finding a house has been in progress. Some of the initial steps that we’ve tried before working with a real estate agent are:
- LMS/Zip Realty.
- Zillow – for those that have an iPhone, I would highly recommend their app. The app allows you to use the build in GPS to navigate to that are listed with them.
- Edina Realty, Century 21, etc.
- Craigslist.
- Driving around neighborhoods we like.
I would like to share that we have had success finding houses for sale either through the web and just driving around looking for “for sale” signs. Through some of this initial process I would like to share some of the struggles that we’ve had thus far.
- If you have a “brochure box” on the top of your “for sale” sign, please keep brochures handy. I understand that printing in color might be a little pricey but there are alternatives (I’ll list a little later on). Today, about 15% of the houses we wanted additional information via the brochure box was empty. Dear sellers, consider this a possible lost customer.
- Not all websites were up-to-date with the status of each house. There were many houses that were sold but the website was not updated accordingly. Result, more time driving and more gas wasted. Result, we found more houses to look at
- If you’re selling your house, please keep up with the landscaping and please clean up the crap around your house/garage (This also includes the banks that own foreclosed houses). There were a number of houses Remember, curb appeal is HUGE!
- There nothing that can really be done about this but it was a tad confusing when there were the “services signs”, aka Bob’s Siding Co. Installed the Siding on this House. This was kind of a false positive when looking. “OH!, there’s one down that street. NOT!”
Enough griping. Homeowners, here are some recommendations that would have hooked me in today or might help others.
- Keep up with landscaping and keep your yard neat.
- If you have low hanging branches are other foliage hiding your house, you might want to clean this up. First impressions happen with houses too.
- If there’s paint pealing take a weekend to scrape and put a fresh coat on. It helps!
- Keep plenty of extra brochures in the brochure box and check daily!
- If you want to go extra cheap on brochures but super informative consider having basic information on your brochure but have a website setup with additional information and pictures. Creating a simple website can be done easily in an evening and in most cases free. Some internet providers give website space for free to customers and other solutions such as Blogger and Wordpress could be used.
Image Source: http://azbigmedia.com/tags-15
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