GearBits

Using Technology to Find Your Dream House

If you read my entry yesterday, you know I have been house hunting. During our search for the "perfect" house, I came to rely more and more on several Internet real estate websites, and I wonder what would have been like to shop for a house when these tools were not available.

First, I've been using our local MLS (multiple listing service) website here at Cincinnati to do our initial search. We can do a search on multiple neighborhoods, price range, and other requirements. You can even do a search on upcoming open houses and new listings as well. The listing also contains several outdoor and indoor pictures, and although they are not perfect, they help us to select or eliminate certain houses from our list of potentials. Some houses even boast virtual tours of the house (where we can scan the 360-degree views of rooms).

We've also discoverd that most county auditors have their own websites that list all the properities in the county. We've been able to look up previous sales data, lot size, improvements, and especially in one county, we can even look at the aerial photo of the house. We wanted to have a wooded backyard view, and the aerial photo helped us elimianate a number of houses that we thought we liked from the MLS list.

Overall, these tools have helped us save tons of time in our search, and who'd ever thought even a couple of years ago, this would have been possible. I wonder whether in not so distant future, we would all be doing virutal house hunting where we don't even have to be at the house physically to find the "perfect" house.