Where To Shop For a Home - Tips and Ideas

Now that you have been pre-approved it is time to start looking for a home. Have you chosen a real estate agent yet? If not, you really ought to consider finding one before you get too deep into looking for home. You can spend a lot of time going to homes that do live up to what you thought by using an agent. Agents have access to a lot of information about homes for sale and can keep you from looking an undesirable homes while getting the right homes in front of you to look at.

Ideas For Where To Look To Find A Home

• Drive around the neighborhoods that you want to live in. Often you’ll find homes for sale by their owner that are not going to be shown to you by your real estate agent. If you find a home this way, you will want to have your agent represent you. Agent representation on your part will keep you out of problems. Your agent will make sure you do your due diligence in checking out the house before you sign on the dotted line.
  
  You will also find homes for sale by real estate agents in your driving around. Feel free to stop by any open house in the area you want to live. You may be surprised at what you find.



• Multiple Listing Service - MLS: In most places in the country, you must have a relationship with a real estate agent to get access to the MLS. Most agents will put you on some sort of email service that will email you listings that match your specific criteria as they come on the market. This can be an effective way to find a home, however, if it is a seller’s market homes might be already sold by the time they hit the MLS. In a seller’s market you will have to act fast if you find something you want.



• Online. There are a tremendous amount of resources online to search for homes. Some of these services will give you partial information on a property. To gain full access you’ll either have to subscribe to some service, or you’ll have to have your real estate agent get you information on a property that you want to see. The list for searching online is extensive and cannot be completely listed here. Places to check are: PropertyNut.com, CraigsList.com, Realtor.com, ForSaleByOwner.com, and so on...
  
  Another option for getting started would be to just go to Google, or Yahoo, AOL or your favorite search engine and do a search for “homes for sale” and you are bound to have literally 1000’s of homes to sift through.



• Magazine Ads and Newspaper Ads: In just about every newspaper around the country you will find homes for sale. Although the information is limited you will be able to find enough information to at least decide whether you want to see the property or now.


Another place to look is at the magazine stands near the entrance to just about every grocery store in the U.S. Homes Illustrated and Homes & Land and Harmon Homes are probably the most familiar names you might know of. These magazines typically have color glossy ads and can give you a good sense of whether you want to see the property or not. You will need to be quick once you see something as there are many eyes looking through those pages.



• One very valuable place to find homes for sale is by talking to your co workers, friends, family, neighbors. Quite often they will know of a home that is going on sale, just went on sale and can give you a heads up – especially if you tell them that you are looking for a new home to buy.

Although this list is not exhaustive, it should give you some ideas on where to get started with looking for a home. Roughly 80% of all home buyers start their home search online. It is a very valuable place to start. Happy House Hunting.