Best Real Estate Website
A friend and I are starting to look into buying a home. One of the latest Fortune editions has LA with the biggest price drop in 2009 at 25%, and they expect it will continue to drop another 5% in 2010. That plus some upcoming government incentives make it a good time to start looking for the perfect deal.
Unfortunately looking for a home on the interwebs isn’t nearly as easy as it should be. The largest database is apparently the MLS, but they seem to be a hodgepodge of crappy search engines built into even crappier real estate website. And the home information is limited, which I assume is to help keep real estate agents in a job. Though they are apparently starting to open the doors.
I started looking into homes about a year ago and found Zillow and Trulia. These websites gave me a little hope, but they definitely had a limited number of listings, many of which seemed out of date.
This time around however, I found Redfin. While the other two said they found more homes in a search in Glendora, Redfin showed what seemed like 10x more on the map. Their map is way more polished as well, with easy filtering, and the ability to distinguish between “for sale by owner”, “for sale by agent”, and bank owned homes. Also, I’ve yet to find a home in my agent’s MLS listings that hasn’t also been in Redfin. It really does kick butt.
On a related note, I found mortgagecalculator.org pretty useful. It does a good job of showing you exactly how your mortgage works out.
Jim said:
Feb 03, 09 at 10:58 pmJim from Redfin here. So glad you enjoy the site! A bit of clarification on the different inventories of listings you’re seeing on different sites. Since Redfin is a member of the MLS, we are displaying every active MLS listing. Other sites you mentioned are displaying a subset of these listings based on deals with specific brokerages. When searching for a city, we only return results from within that city’s limits instead of the general area, which is why our results counts may appear lower. You can always click “Remove outline” to see every listing in the visible map.
Best of luck with your home search!
Steve said:
Feb 03, 09 at 11:06 pmHa! Awesome.
Real Estate in Panama said:
Jul 20, 09 at 4:40 amAt least you have an MLS. I have been living and working in Panama for two years and realtors guard their client list like they are hoarding gold. You need to deal with a realtor in the area where you are going and someone well connected (as in has arrangements with other realtors) to find property.