Helpful hunting with these home-listing sites
Picking a real estate listings website can be a little like picking a real estate agent -- they’re not all cut from the same cloth.
Although consumers generally settle in with a single agent, they may find it helpful to play the field when searching for homes on the Web.
Last week, we looked at the pros and cons of some of the Internet’s most-visited real estate listings sites.
In the course of a hypothetical search for a three-bedroom Santa Monica home, we came across several websites that were not among our top results producers but had certain qualities to recommend them.
Here are a few:
DotHomes.com: Billing itself as a “real estate search engine,” DotHomes scans the websites of agents and brokerages and returns listings in a way reminiscent of Google. The comparison is not accidental -- there’s an “I’m Feeling Wealthy” search button that pays tongue-in-cheek homage to Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button; it returns listings by price. Much like a general search engine, it allows you to enter your parameters very efficiently in one box as if they were keywords, such as “Santa Monica, CA 3 bedrooms.”
FrontDoor.com: One thing that listings sites tend to lack is content that’s broader than the listings themselves. That’s not the case with FrontDoor, where the popular HGTV cable channel has leveraged its archive of home-improvement and real estate programming. Be warned, however, that if you’re a fan of the channel, it might be tempting to kill a lot of time watching videos of “Designed to Sell” host Lisa LaPorta ripping out bad bathroom tile. Non-video content includes numerous brief articles on the ins and outs of buying and selling. On the listings side, the site helpfully breaks them down by neighborhood.
CyberHomes.com: This site also has easy-to-access content: a big library of articles on the nuts and bolts of real estate. CyberHome’s Explore Maps feature goes way beyond the usual mapping -- with this tool, you can zero in on neighborhoods where there isn’t much crime or areas where there are likely to be a lot of toddlers.
Movoto.com: You may be able to make up the time you lost looking at the videos at FrontDoor.com when you get to the noticeably efficient home search at Movoto. Enter your search parameters, and it returns 20 listings at a time, shown in pairs. Click on one of them, and it delivers lots of information about that property, including detailed lists of local schools and community amenities, plus demographic information, all in one continuous scroll, without having to click on a lot of links.
OpenHouse.com: The name says it all. If you’re setting out on a Sunday to stalk homes for sale, OpenHouse can be a useful tool for planning your itinerary. The details that are available for each listing vary quite a lot, depending on what the agent has included. There are also “virtual open houses,” which translate into tons of photographs and videos of many properties.
Wal-Mart.com: Although it’s too soon to say, “Look out, Craigslist,” the retail behemoth’s recent entry into free classified advertising should not be dismissed. Wal-Mart, after all, is Wal-Mart. In addition to the free consumer-submitted listings, it aggregates broker ads through a partnership with Oodle.com. The number of listings that turned up in our searches in July was not huge, but the service is only a few months old. A search here can be broken down by the usual bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage etc., as well as by homes for sale by agents, via foreclosure or FSBO (for sale by owner).
