Whizbang features on real estate sites
Online real estate broker Sawbuck Realty recently unveiled a few new features, including a no-maximum search function. Want to see all 5,491 homes for sale in or near Baltimore? It won't lecture you to narrow your search.
That got me thinking about the wide variety of real estate search sites out there, and how most have something nifty in hopes of getting your undying love, or more specifically your continual usage.
Redfin, for instance, lets you select (or deselect) homes to include in your search not only by size and price, but also whether the price has been reduced, the home is for-sale-by-owner, the condition is "fixer-upper," the sale requires bank approval and the like. (That's under "more options.")
Trulia tallies up the price reductions in your area of interest and spits out a list, which you can edit to specify whether you just want the price reductions in, say, the past seven days. Then amuse yourself by sorting the list -- from highest price to low, by number of photos, etc.
(Unfortunately, the "number of photos" option can be fooled by those who upload each of their photos several times to inflate the grand total. At least that's the impression I get from the listing that has 84 photos, only 28 of them unique. Tsk, tsk.)
FranklyMLS.com, which bills itself as the first wiki multiple-listing site, offers up its listings in spreadsheet format, which looks decidedly un-flashy but allows you to see a lot of information about a lot of homes at a glance -- including the asking price, the original asking price and the assessed value. (Press a button and export it directly into your own spreadsheet.)
Some sites let you search just the places having open houses in the near future. Here's the list that HomesDatabase spits out for Baltimore.
And some tally up market-area data. Zillow.com might be best known for its Zestimates of individual homes, but it also shows overall stats on asking prices, sale prices and its estimation of how home values have changed. (On a related note: First American CoreLogic has just sued Zillow over its Zestimates, and several other real estate companies over their home-valuation efforts, alleging that the firms are infringing on its automated appraisal patent.)
What features do you find most useful when you're looking at homes for sale? What's plain annoying?
What do you wish someone would add?
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Comments
I would prefer a site with satelleite view, Bing maps birds eye view, Google street view, as many large pictures as possible and 3-D in the house views.
Ziprealty does a prety good job under the Maps tab, giving access to full page satellite and Bing birds eye views. The home pictures, however, are too small. They do not include a google street view.
Bottom line: Site should allow virtual visualization so good it essentially replaces the (nearly worthless) realtor
Posted by: Darwin Rules | May 5, 2010 9:08 AM
Boston Logic is creating sites for real estate brokerages that have some great features. Here are some examples:
www.warrenrentals.com
www.allaccessboston.com
www.nhhomes.com
Their site is www.bostonlogic.com
Posted by: David | May 5, 2010 2:41 PM
Unfortunately, I don't think any of them allow you to search for off-street parking (well, you could try to KW search with FranklyRealty).
None of them handle large sizes of saved favorites.
Posted by: Mike | May 5, 2010 3:18 PM
I agree with Darwin Rules, more pictures and information save both the buyer and the Realtor time (which is money).
and Mike, the problem with having off street parking as a search criteria is that is actually only useful for a very small subset of places. So it won't be included as a search option. Now if Realtors included that info in the text of the listing and you could search that that would do the trick.
Posted by: Paul | May 5, 2010 5:09 PM
www.choicea.com isn't bad either.
Posted by: alex p | May 8, 2010 1:49 PM