Home Buying on the Internet?

[Linhurst]

I am intrigued by the internet sites that have been started in the past several years to buy and sell homes. Some sites include homes posted by Realtors, some are strictly for homes which are "For Sale by Owner" and some sites allow both. Has anyone had any experience using these sites?

[bigtoe]

Partly curiosity, partly just for comparisons, and actually to set what I felt was a fair market price when selling a home I use the local Realtors Multiple Listing Service, a section open for the public to use to look up houses for sale in different areas of my town as well as in prospective towns we thought of relocation to..... I was stunned to see asking prices 2 years ago, just at the downhill start of the peaked market.... these folks or their realter or both were in dreamland as far as I could see......... I established what I fealt was a fair market value for the house and for my realtor to ask for... I did a small increase in the sales percentage for the listing/selling realtor as a motivator for the realtors using the site..........

House was sold in 3 days and escrow closed in 3 weeks to accomodate the buyers....... Over a year later I saw some of those area houses still for sale, and also found some that had sold....... well below the fair market value I got for the house a year earlier and substantially below their initial asking price for the house....... I follow the housing market via web sites as well as local printed media just out of curiosity and for personal knowledge..... I don't play the "real estate market" as an investor.

But, I firmly believe if one pays attention - to any degree - with web sites on local real estate, when the time comes to buy or sell you would be in the satisfied customer corner with just a good understanding of reality in real estate.......  I guess the same could be said about stocks, bonds, cars or other physical items.. the web just offers a few extra tools at one sitting to assist us with knowledge and awareness........... Al

[bigtoe]

An additional site for new/used homes, listed by city & state or by zip code, which I started looking at is FrontDoor dot com http://frontdoor.com/... Found it by watching some episodes on HGTV (Home & Garden TV)... Found listings on it for a vacation home that were not listed at Zillow.com, and only partially listed with a local MRL site.......

If nothing else, it is a chance to dream at different possibilities.......