Searching Online for a Home in Alpharetta? What Would You Like Your Search Engine to Do?
categories: Buyers, Stuff I like to talk about
I was online last night looking at various home search websites, comparing and contrasting and trying to determine what works best. I stumbled upon the Real Estate Book and while it is not that different than any other online home search engine it has some nice features.
You can search for foreclosures (there is an integration with RealtyTrac) and you can search for "new listings," although it doesn’t tell you how new. What would you like in a search engine that you haven’t been able to find to date?
I’m not exactly sure where The Real Estate Book is getting its listing data. However, it provides a database of over over 400,000 homes for sale in the US, which is an over kill for me but I guess if you want to price things around the country it could be useful. It is showing 654 listings for Alpharetta homes for sale.
I picked a larger city for my area, Atlanta homes for sale, and it allowed me to check other nearby towns by hovering my mouse over the city tags. For example there are 356 homes for sale in Roswell. However, it didn’t allow me to select cities like Johns Creek or Milton from the list. I know these cities are new, but I think what we have is a generic solution built for Anywhere, USA and it fails to understand the local housing landscape and political boundaries. Guess you have to rely on me for that ;-> and perhaps a more local solution.
Unbelievably, there seem to be lots of people who are not using the Internet as the Free Real Estate Book magazine still has a distribution of over 8.5 million copies. This is the same Real Estate Book that all the agents in my office used to advertise in religiously but which I haven’t heard a whisper of in a loooooooong time. It looks like they are switching their strategy to online. Duh.
Please let me know which are your favorite online home search engines. I’m always looking for ways to improve the way people can search for homes and my own website search engine. Remember, one of my latest projects is working with the guys at softrealty.com on their new search engine. It is still in beta but has a lot of promise.
Let me know what you’d like to be able to do, but have a hard time doing currently when searching for a home online. What would be your killer application?
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We had plenty of time to search the listings over the 8 months it took our house in MD to sell. Although we were pretty sure we wanted to buy in East Cobb, we stopped by your site a number of times and found it very helpful. I can’t say we had any one favorite search site, but the most helpfull features were: 1) ability search by school, 2) ability to specify hi/lo price range rather than by $25k blocks; 3) links to map and aerial views, 4) search/load speed; and 5) lots of pictures. Map interfaces were nice (probobly the wave of the future) but tended to be a little awkwardly implimented. As I got more familier with what we were looking for and what was on the market, I would have liked to be able to exclude features (such as neighborhoods we didn’t like) as well as include features on the queries.
Kevin,
The Real Estate Book syndicates out to a couple dozen different websites. If you have TREB in your market, take advantage of it. While the move is away from print advertising, you Internet exposure your listings get from TREB is great. We get more email inquiries from them than all other print combined.
Kevin- great to meet you at RETechSouth. How have you enjoyed the SoftRealty search thus far?
softRealty has been good and is continually getting better. You can search on more parameters than with other solutions and softRealty just added FMLS data to their house data…(they have both GA MLS and FMLS now.)
Although we liked it better before they went Web 2.0 on us, one feature of the Coldwell Banker site is a relatively easy “search by neighborhood name”. And, they put the name in the link as a GET parameter, so you can bookmark it, and swap out neighborhood names easily.